The Help

Goodreads Synopsis:
Twenty-two-year-old Skeeter has just returned home after graduating from Ole Miss. She may have a degree, but it is 1962, Mississippi, and her mother will not be happy till Skeeter has a ring on her finger. Skeeter would normally find solace with her beloved maid Constantine, the woman who raised her, but Constantine has disappeared and no one will tell Skeeter where she has gone.

Aibileen is a black maid, a wise, regal woman raising her seventeenth white child. Something has shifted inside her after the loss of her own son, who died while his bosses looked the other way. She is devoted to the little girl she looks after, though she knows both their hearts may be broken.

Minny, Aibileen's best friend, is short, fat, and perhaps the sassiest woman in Mississippi. She can cook like nobody's business, but she can't mind her tongue, so she's lost yet another job. Minny finally finds a position working for someone too new to town to know her reputation. But her new boss has secrets of her own.

Seemingly as different from one another as can be, these women will nonetheless come together for a clandestine project that will put them all at risk. And why? Because they are suffocating within the lines that define their town and their times. And sometimes lines are made to be crossed.

The Help by Kathryn Stockett

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


I've refrained from watching the movie until after I read the book. Now that I'm done, I'm very interested to see how the movie was adapted from this. I got off to a rough start because the language that Aibileen was using was pretty difficult to understand. Once I got a handle on that, I took off. I thought the book was compelling, you cared about the characters you were supposed to care about and you disliked the characters you were supposed to dislike but at times, you understood them and cared about them as well. You wanted Hilly's minions to see the light and stand back from racism. I was scared and nervous for what would happen to Skeeter and Aibee and Minny and all of the other maids.

I didn't care for the setup of the novel. Skeeter is trying to find a job and she applies for one in New York. Stein gives her some real life wisdom on how to become a successful author. Skeeter goes from a woman who is mildly repelled by Hilly thinking the help need their own toilet, to being downright outraged and needing to tell their story. It just didn't add up to me. Even when she is confronted with blatant racism from her dying mother and friends, she lacks the actual conviction to speak out. I understand that she had to hold her tongue to protect the identities of the people in the book and even protect herself, but I just wish that there had been more apparent passion for the cause than for the process of becoming a successful author. The black women came to trust and care for her because they thought she would be the change that they needed, and she cared about them too. But she cared much more about hitting her deadline and seeing where it would take her. She even chose to leave out what would have been a very interesting part of the book when she decided not to print about her mother. The story about what her mother did to Constantine's daughter was exactly the kind of behavior that could have helped the book make a bigger difference. But she left it out because it was about her family and far too horrible. She would run over a bunch of black women that she is representing, but not her mother. I didn't care for that.

I can't say how accurate the language and atmosphere is because hey, I'm not a 60's child, but I got sucked into the world. It is bizaar to think of how far the world has come since the 60's. It is discouraging to see how far we still have to go. I was very responsive to Kathryn Stockett's writing. I hope to read more by her in the future.



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