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.
Customer Reviews:
Avg. Customer Rating: 4.5 / 5.0
Amazing.:
This is easily the best book I have read in a long time. I had never heard or it, it was not recommended to me, and I did not see it at Borders. I just happened across it on Amazon and decided to take a gamble on an "unknown". I read this book in 2 days, and was overwhelmed by the amount of feelings it conjures up. This is a great time period novel, and I will be recommending it to all my friends.
page turner:
I loved this book,it was a fast read. The individual characters were interesting and perhaps realistic.
I think some people still do treat people the way the southern women did,and attitudes may not have changed as much as I would like them too.
A brave book with richly illustrated characters:
"The bird that would soar above the level plain of tradition and prejudice must have strong wings." ~Kate Chopin; The Awakening All I could think about as I was reading this book is this author sure is brave. A white woman writing a book about black maids and prejudice in the heart of Mississippi just seemed risky to me. How can a white person possibly relate to what a black person experienced in the sixties? And yet Kathryn Stockett pulls it off beautifully. The Help is definitely a character... more info
Brilliant writing:
This novel does a wonderful job of capturing the relationships between white and black women in the Jim Crow era South. We see the combination of hardship, discrimination, affection and hypocricy that characterized life and race relations in that time and location. Perhaps best of all,the three main characters come to life through remarkably strong and original voices that gain the readers' empathy. This is one fo the best novels I've read in months.
