“The Help” – A Book Review

Description [from www.goodreads.com]: “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.”

MY REVIEW: An amazing, well written book that captivated my attention, curiosity, and my desire to learn.  An insightful look into human sociology as it could have been during one of America’s most trying eras.

I feel that I related mostly to the character, Skeeter.  I think if she were an actual living person, I would admire and look up to her.  She took a stand on what she felt was the right and stuck with it even when the going got tough.

The book club that I am a member of read this book and I am glad to say that most of the women that read it had nothing but compliments for the book.  We typically rank the books we read from 1 – 10, with 10 being the best.  There have been a select few books that have earned 10 rankings from several of the ladies, and this book was definitely one of them.  (If memory serves me, the only other two books that elicited multiple 10′s were Ahab’s Wife by Sena Jeter Naslund and The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society by Mary Ann Shaffer and Annie Barrows)  One lady even said that she gave it a 9 and not a 10 only because she was upset that she had not thought to write it herself!

All in all, I recommend this to anyone and everyone!  Hope you enjoy it as much as my friends and I did.