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The Help Editorial Reviews
Source: Product Description
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.
The Help Customer Reviews:
Average Rating: 4.5 (2514 reviews)
Rating: 5 (Excellent book about the South in the 1960's.) Was helpful to 5 from 6 votes
This is probably going to be one of those books that everyone must read for the historical content and the attitudes that occurred in the South during the early civil rights movement. It was very emotional and the descriptions are so believable that you feel you are almost there as "help" and what these women endured.
Rating: 5 (a treasure of a book) Was helpful to 384 from 417 votes
I was lucky enough to come across an advanced reader copy of this book. Set in Mississippi during the civil rights movement, the story is narrated by the three principal characters...Minny and Aibileen, two black maids, and Miss Skeeter, a young, white woman newly graduated from college. The characters are wonderfully developed, as are the historical background and setting. As each character took her turn at narrating, she became my favorite character until the next one took over again.I was torn between not being able to put the book down and not wanting it to end.
Rating: 5 (I can't say enough good things about this book) Was helpful to 317 from 347 votes
I loved this book. The characters were so real they seemed like friends. The voices were so true it was hard to believe they were fictional. When I came to the end I was sad that it was over and I knew that the story and its message would stick with me for a long time. This is a book about love and suffering, hatred and faith, fear and courage. It is about women of strength and dignity who carry on and manage to care about others despite an unjust system. It is a beautiful book, unforgettable in many ways. It is touching, thought-provoking, humorous and compelling. It is one of the best books I've read on race relations in the 1960s Deep South. It is gentle, yet powerful, moving without being melodramatic, and most of all, realistic in every detail. I can't recommend it highly enough.
PARENTS AND TEACHERS: Mild, infrequent swearing, painful race issues/gross injustice, oblique/slang references to sex, references to domestic violence, a graphic miscarriage scene, and one short scene in which a crazy white man exposes himself to a maid and her employer.
Rating: 5 (Intriguing characters - vivid picture of an era) Was helpful to 1 from 2 votes
Kathryn Stockett's style is totally captivating - and I say this as one who seldom enjoys 'dialect stories' and who, though a lover of history, is hardly an expert on the US South. I was completely absorbed in the comments and histories of the three major characters from the outset. The book is written in sections, alternating their 'first person' viewpoints, and has a quality of reminiscence which made me feel as if I were seated across from each of them.
The highly natural, anecdotal style in which each character presents her story provides a deep, often very troubling, intensely insightful view of the racial and class situation - and I blush to admit that I'd never realised the degree of both legal and functional segregation still existed during the 1960s. It is helpful, in broadening the picture, that the three main characters are of very different personalities. The two maids, Abilene and Minny, are a study in contrasts: one dignified, wise, and very intelligent; the other choleric and outspoken. "Miss Skeeter" does not seem racist, and indeed is inwardly sickened by the hateful attitudes of some of her acquaintances, yet her naivete, perhaps total affective ignorance, of the situations of the 'coloured' servants is mind boggling. If I may be forgiven a cliché, I thought of Margaret Mitchell's Scarlett and Mammy, where the latter indeed is wise and insightful, yet Scarlett and friends see their servants' lives as happy and contented, never giving a thought to any cracks in this mirror of white notions of bliss.
Though there are references to the larger civil rights movement and characters make personal comments about the horrors they've seen, the limited scope in most of the book's action is surprisingly effective. This is not a 'preachy' work, nor one which turns into a bitter, 'white vs. black' battle by any means. Somehow, the blindness of Skeeter's perspective, and the simplicity of much of what one learns from dignified Abilene or outspoken Minny, as well as strong suggestions of the dangers the maids could face by sharing any details of their lives, is more powerful than a chronicle of the larger situation would be in a novel.
I found myself feeling as if I knew everyone who 'speaks' - and feeling as if they were people who mattered to me. Stockett has a gift for characterisation that avoids extremes or historical 'pat answers,' and shows the great walls that existed between people (of different races and classes) who interacted constantly. Some of the comments of Skeeter's family and acquaintances made me shudder from the outset, yet it was amazing (and a snapshot of blindness) that Skeeter remained unaware of the maids' situation, and even of their being people with eyes and ears who had the deplorable comments and reactions going on in the very rooms where they served.
Rating: 5 (Love it) Was helpful to 0 from 2 votes
Just when I was ready to slit my wrists from boredom along comes a great book. I loved the way this book was written. The characters jumped out of the book and sat next to you telling the story. This book is great. If you want to read a book with allot of feelings falling out of it, this is your book.
