Review of The Help by Kathryn Stockett

Welcome back to my book review blog! I took an unexpected hiatus from this site to get some other projects done, but now I'm back. I recently joined/founded a book club with some former coworkers of mine, and today was the inaugural meeting where we discussed The Help by Kathryn Stockett, which I chose. I know I'm a little behind on this book, since it came out a few years ago, but there's so many books and only so much time. It was sitting on my list of things to read, and I finally decided to bump it up to the top of the pile.

The Help revolves around  a small group of citizens of Jackson, Mississippi in the early 1960s. We are

introduced to Eugenia "Skeeter" Phelan, a young privileged white woman, Aibileen, an elder maid, and Minny, a feisty maid. Minny and Aibileen are maids for Skeeter's friends, Hilly and Elizabeth respectively. We alternate between the three POVs, giving the reader a chance to see the events through differing eyes and perspectives. Skeeter is the white woman seeking for something more in her life than just finding a husband and fitting into the debutante world of the genteel South. Aibileen is tending to her 17th white child and is just trying to get through each day as a maid the best she knows how. Minny is on her 19th job, having lost many before due to her unfortunate tendency to sass off to the families she worked for. Minny and Aibileen are good friends and barely know Skeeter, only seeing her at functions their employers hold.

Skeeter longs to be a journalist and a writer. She manages to get a job at the local paper as an advice columnist to give house keeping pointers. One problem: Skeeter knows nothing about how to clean a house. She asks her friend Elizabeth's maid, Ailibeen, to help her answer the letters for the advice column. After this uneasy alliance is formed, Skeeter contacts an editor in a New York publishing company about getting something published. The editor challenges Skeeter to write something she wants to write, not what she thinks she should write. A crazy idea forms in Skeeter's head about writing a book full of interviews of black house maids. A Civil Rights movement is just starting and the world outside Jackson, MS is changing, and Skeeter feels she wants to have a part in changing the culture and mindset of her segregated town. After asking Aibileen numerous times to be part of her project, Skeeter starts a chain reaction that she nor the maids who agree to help with the book saw coming.

This was a fantastic read. Kathryn Stockett dipped into her own personal experience of living in the South and having a maid to build the fictional characters of this Jackson, MS. Stockett does an amazing job of transporting the reader back into the 1960s South and helping the reader feel the polarizing world of the culture, a world of the Haves and Have Nots. The three main characters have their own struggles, so separate from each other and yet very fundamentally similar. Each character has their own personal boundaries, societal constructs that force them into certain spaces, certain roles, that neither feel terribly comfortable in. The Help takes the reader on a journey of rebellion, introspection, and self-discovery. It touches on the theme that we are the authors of our life's story and that we are only stuck in someone else's restrictions if we allow ourselves to be. As the reader, you are taken on a subtle roller coaster ride through a segregated world that can be both honorable and deceitful, beautiful and ugly, touching and terrifying. Within the same chapter we see the ugly truth of the class/race separation and also the humor of one well-put snarky commentary of the cultural constructs.

I highly recommend this book. If you've already read it, reread it. I bet if you read it again, you'll pick up on something that you missed the first time through. At our book group we speculated on what it would be like if Stockett wrote a sequel, following Skeeter in the new chapter of her life, and how interesting that would be. Again, highly recommend this book, either read it on your own or in a group. On my rating of 1 (literary hari kari) to 10 (literary orgasm), I give this book an 8.5.

Next month will be a new book for the book club, so hopefully I can get back into the habit of posting here again. Thanks for hanging on for so long. :)