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The Help (Hardcover)

By Kathryn Stockett (Author)

Book Details
* Hardcover: 464 pages
* Publisher: Putnam Adult; 1 edition (February 10, 2009)
* Language: English
* ISBN-10: 0399155341
* ISBN-13: 978-0399155345
* Dimensions: 9.1 x 6 x 1.9 inches
* Shipping Weight: 2.1 pounds

Book Description
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.

The Help Review
My family came to Chicago in the 1940s from Mississippi. They were sharecroppers and picked cotton. Sometimes my grandmother worked in white houses as the help. This book reminds me of stories my grandmother and mother told us children. The author gets the humor just right. The character Minny could have been my grandmother. I laughed and I cried as I read this book. Sometimes, I put it aside just to think about what the story and the characters were telling me. At other times I reflected on what the fictional characters and the real maids lives were like. As soon as I finished, I started reading it all over again. It made me love my grandmother even more if that’s possible. I loved this book. Thanks to Kathryn Stockette.

Kathryn Stockett has written a wonderful book populated with women I “know”. I lived in Birmingham, AL, for over thirty years and met many woman who had been raised in the 50s and 60s and had not shed that culture – not out of mean, but ignorance. I started the book and could barely put it down; it was a quick read for me and I was anxious to see what would happen next. I am always amazed at how strong and brave women can be, and how stupid and complacent women can be. Kathryn Stockett did a terrific job of presenting these complexities within the framework of a great story.

This is probably going to be one of those books that everyone must read for the historical content and the attitudes that occurred in the South during the early civil rights movement. It was very emotional and the descriptions are so believable that you feel you are almost there as “help” and what these women endured.

I agree substantially with the previous reviewers who have commented on the book’s readability and good-heart. But it is what it is, a white woman’s (admittedly a sensitive white woman) attempt to get into the shoes (well, not exactly) of the local “help”, i.e. black women. Not exactly a noble effort; it is a novelist’s basic responsibility to see w/ another eyes. It is praiseworthy only insofar as it is done successfully. But the fact remains that the white women (in contrast to “the help” what are THEY?) are shown in full and the reader feels he/she knows them, in all their meanness and back-biting, while the black women are brave, strong,stoic… caricatures. They endure, like Faulkner’s Dilsey, but they do not levitate off the page. A very good try.

I was lucky enough to come across an advanced reader copy of this book. Set in Mississippi during the civil rights movement, the story is narrated by the three principal characters…Minny and Aibileen, two black maids, and Miss Skeeter, a young, white woman newly graduated from college. The characters are wonderfully developed, as are the historical background and setting. As each character took her turn at narrating, she became my favorite character until the next one took over again.I was torn between not being able to put the book down and not wanting it to end.

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