The Help by Stockett

I can’t believe I’ve done it again— but with a little variance. I started reading this book last winter and read the first 9 chapters in Dutch while visiting my cousin on Holland.

It’s been in the back of my mind since it was an interesting book, but I didn’t want to carry a thick book back in carry-on luggage. Now, since the movie is due out soon, I thought I’d finish it. I started it yesterday and have 2 chapters to go—so it’s been another frenzied reading marathon because I need to get back to my dissertation work as well as my work-work!!
So what can I say about The Help? I’d say that you should read it. The novel is set in Mississippi in the late 1950’s and early 1960’s—right when the Civil Rights movement was taking place. It’s the story of life as told from the African-American maids’ perspective… they tell all in how it was to work for a white family, how they endured the stings, insults, and horrible accusations hurled at them. Yet all the while, the maids raised white children and loved them as their own, helped white women manage their households, and kept family secrets.

The story centers around Skeeter, a privileged white college graduate with ambitions to become a journalist, who convinces two maids to talk to her about what it is like to serve in white families. Aibilene, a mid-fifties maid, and Minny, a maid in her twenties agree to let Skeeter meet them in Aibilene’s home during the evenings, where they talk and talk about what it is like to serve in white women’s homes. Aibiline tells her story of loving white children until they get to an age where they develop social awareness of the social differences between white and black in Southern Mississippi. Minny tells her story of the time she was accused of stealing the family silver and how her former employer made it so that she couldn’t get a job with any other family.
Tension unfolds in the beginning of the story when Skeeter serves as editor of the junior league’s newsletter and is told by Hilly, the junior league president, social influencer, and one of many sorority sisters living in this small town, that she must publish Hilly’s editorial about the need for each white family to build separate toilets for the maids. Thus Hilly is quickly set up as the story’s villain, and Minny, who used to work for Hilly, has a secret that involves a chocolate pie as revenge.
The book is coming out as a movie next week—and while I don’t like movie theatres, I think I’ll be going to see this movie.
For more details on The Help see the book reviews in the New York Times and the Washington Post:
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/19/books/19masl.html
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/03/31/AR2009033103552.html