The Help: Book Review

This book came HIGHLY recommended by so many people: fellow bloggers, friends & mostly my family.  My aunt read it this summer, called me & said I had to pick it up.  She even bought a copy for my grandmother. 

I picked it up from the library one afternoon & started reading that night.  I finally went to bed at 3am when I couldn't hold my eyes open any longer and the words were blurry on the page.  I finished it the next day as soon as possible.

The synopsis from Kathryn Stockett's website:

Three ordinary women are about to take one extraordinary step.

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.

In pitch-perfect voices, Kathryn Stockett creates three extraordinary women whose determination to start a movement of their own forever changes a town, and the way women--mothers, daughters, caregivers, friends--view one another. A deeply moving novel filled with poignancy, humor, and hope, The Help is a timeless and universal story about the lines we abide by, and the ones we don't.

This book was so well written it's hard to believe it was the author's first novel.  She writes with such grace and finesse, you fall in love with the characters.

I laughed when I came to the part about Skeeter going to Ole Miss.  It seemed her sorority sisters were attending college in the hopes of earning a MRS degree.  It's funny to me because there are still girls that do that today. 

The South in the novel was long gone by the time I was born.  Civil Rights had been won and integration was over.  But that doesn't mean I haven't seen the after effects or that it still doesn't exist in my South.    My grandparents that raised me had a house keeper until I was 6 years old and we moved.  Gladys was a part of my life 3 days a week.  She fed me, played with me & cared for me.   Years before that there was another woman who came to the house and cared for my aunts and dad.  My grandmother worked outside of the home, but daycare wasn't an option in the 60's like it is today.  She did what everyone else did and hired a woman to help. 

If you haven't read this book yet, go pick it up.  It's told in a true Southern voice. She raises questions and tells a story that hasn't been told before.  It made me think of the age old advice about judging people until you've walked a mile in their shoes.   To quote Ms. Stockett, "Wasn't that the point of the book? For women to realize, we are just two people. Not that much separates us. Not nearly as much as I'd thought."