The Help

The Help by Kathryn Stockett
Published February 10th 2009
451 pages
Genre: Adult Fiction
Stars: 5/5

Description: 

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.

My thoughts:

I absolutely adored everything about this book. I've been wanting to read it for a while now and have heard so many good things about it and it definitely did not disappoint. I was hooked from the very start and every single page felt important. 

Aibileen was an incredibly powerful character and her narration brought a lot of life into the story. I also really enjoyed Minny's presence and her encounters with Miss Celia. Skeeter felt like she was in the background a lot but that felt really fitting- this was the maids' story, not her's. She was still a very strong and interesting character and it was intriguing watching how her ideas turned into something so big. The writing was really good- it all flowed well and each narrator had a really distinct voice. 

I liked the author's note at the end- it brought it all together and it was nice to see that Stockett drew from personal experience when writing the book. It made it feel a lot more real and honest. This book will certainly stay with me for a very long and I would recommend it to anybody.