-Kathryn Stockett
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.
-----
I enjoyed this book and film, even though I found some of the characters quite stereotypical of the time period. I do feel the film fleshed the characters better and helped with understanding more so than when I was reading about them.
The author included this quote by Howell Raines in the excerpt at the end of her novel:
“There is no trickier subject for a writer from the South than that of affection between a black person and a white one in the unequal world of segregation. For the dishonesty upon which a society is founded makes every emotion suspect, makes it impossible to know whether what flowed between two people was honest feeling or pity or pragmatism.”
I feel that quote perfectly summed up the challenges of writing and conveying this story to the reader and further acknowledges the reader’s personal perspective may affect their interpretation of the story as well. I felt the author captured the authenticity and complexity of the differing relationship perspectives; Good and bad. Love and hate. Fear and security.
In general, I feel this novel and film may be good resources for conversations about privilege, racism and white saviorism. While I feel this book showed differences of thought among a diverse group of people, I also feel it highlighted just how similar we actually are. I hope for a day when our differences can be celebrated and appreciated and respected …. and not forced to fit into a label or box to make others feel better.
Heidi Y.