"The Help"

With all the hype this book (and more recently, the movie) has received, I kind of feel that it doesn’t need another review.  However, to be fair to all the other books I have read recently, it has to be included in my list of “Books You Must Read”.

When this book very first hit the bookstores, my daughter bought it for me as a birthday present.  Being so new, I had not heard much of a buzz so I didn’t have any expectations.  Expectations or not … this novel is amazing!  It is one of those books that kept me up late into the night reading. If I was to simply say it was story about the life of black maids in Jackson, Mississippi in the 1960's, I would be doing it a disservice.  The author succeeds in showing that we are more alike than we realize. This book shows the triumph of the human spirit.  Thanks Kassie for giving me “The Help“.

Here’s a quick look at what  “The Help” is all about:

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.