The Help - Kathryn Stockett

5/5 stars

The Help is a magnificent book recounting the lives of African-American maids and their white employers in Jackson, Mississippi, at the beginning of the 1960’s through 3 narrators. Skitter is 22 years old, just graduated from college, wants to be a journalist in New York, and is back home in Mississippi. Aibileen is a 50 year old maid working for Elizabeth and practically raising Elizabeth’s children. Finally, Minni is another maid and has a hard time finding a job because of her big mouth. The focus of the book is simple: all three women are united in an undercover and dangerous endeavor –which I am not going to reveal so as not so spoil half of the book.

The author succeeds in writing in all three voices, including the two maids’ voices, with their grammatical errors and approximations, with such love and understanding for her characters that you cannot but love them and root for them as well. My emotions ran high while reading this book: anger at the white women, ignorant, intolerant, and happy in their status quo; tenderness at the way the maids raise kids who are not their own, while neglecting their own; hope in the project the 3 women undertake; mainly, a sense of wonder at how people lived then.

This book is a work of fiction, but almost feels like a sociological study of the lives of the South in the 1960’s. The reader is thrown in a world where love and anger, despair and expectations cohabit daily, where manners and social status are more important than feelings and true friendships. I adore this book. It is courageous and beautiful, like its protagonists.