By: Madison C.
Lush, original, and poignant, Kathryn Stockett has written a wondrous novel set in the deep south told through the authentic voices of Aibileen, Minnie, and Skeeter, three unforgettable women whose lives and points of view intersect vividly against a landscape of hopeful change in America. While reading The Help you will be swept away as they work, play, and love during a time when possibilities for women were few but their dreams of the future were limitless.
Set in Stockett's native Jackson, MS, in the early 1960s, this first novel adopts the complicated theme of blacks and whites living in a segregated South. A century after the Emancipation Proclamation, black maids raised white children and ran households but were paid poorly, often had to use separate toilets from the family, and watched the children they cared for commit bigotry. In Stockett's narrative, Miss Skeeter, a young white woman, is a naive, aspiring writer who wants to create a series of interviews with local black maids. Even if they're published anonymously, the risk is great; still, Aibileen and Minny agree to participate. Tension pervades the novel as its events are told by these three memorable women. Is this an easy book to read? No, but it is surely worth reading. It may even stir things up as readers in Jackson and beyond question their own discrimination and intolerance in the past and present.
I love The Help. Kathryn Stockett has given us glorious characters and a powerful, truth-filled story. Aibileen, Minny, and Skeeter show that people from this troubled time came together despite their differences and that ordinary women can be heroic.
The Help, Kathryn Stockett, Penguin Books, April 2011, 544 pages
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