Book Review: The Help

Author:  Kathryn Stockett

Pages: 451

Year of publishing: 2009

Rating: ★★★★★

Related posts: Not yet available

Synopsis: 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.

Review: This book is definitely the best book I’ve read this year and I will be among my ten favorite books this year.

Three years ago I saw the movie in an English class in my high school and I promised myself that I had to read the book of that film that I was loved both. With the film I laughed and really thrilled me but I loved more the book.

The book talks about how people lived in the sixties and it’s really hard to think that this happened as recently, but the harder it is to think that there are still people with this ideology that white people are superior. The author presents many themes delicates but in a natural way so it is not overly dramatic this book. In those years the main differences between blacks and whites are: neighborhoods, buses, jobs, education, bathrooms … Yes, bathrooms, even in this, the difference was noticeable. No person of color could go to the bathroom of a white person, some had a separate bathroom for them but … not all had it. So those who did not have their own bathroom should do things in the garden as if it they were a dog and this for one person is very hard. You imagine how you would feel if you because your skin color is different to his boss ,you must do your needs in the garden, I honestly can’t imagine that. Also the jobs for people of color were very limited and mostly the women work in cleaning and care of children as if they were her children. In fact there is a scene that I almost made me mourn, in this scene Aibileen talks with a little girl (Mae Mobley) that she is beautiful, intelligent and good, and also Aibileen says that Mae should ignore  to her mother because her mother called her stupid, ugly and fat, and this not is true. Mae’s mother really is Aibileen because she plays with Mae, she cared for to Mae when she sick, she gives affection when Mae needs it… I will only say that her mother called ‘thing’ her daughter. And yet this work was underpaid and was not valued, however without them many lives would have been chaos.

The Help is narrated from the point of view of each of the people of color who have experienced many different stories and cruel, but there are three main characters: Aibileen, Skeeter and Minny. Aibileen is undoubtedly my favorite character, although she had suffered in the past continues with a smile on the face for the people. I also took affection to Minny because he says things to your face and never is conforms, also the scene of the cake (if you read this book you will know that I say because it is the most comical and disgusting scene at the same time) is the scene I remember most about the whole book. In general all the characters in this book are loved for me and are very well presented.

Really, you have to read this book because I promise it will teach you a lot and I like learn. It is a reading sweet, fun and hard at the same time. It teaches you to fulfill your dreams, for example when Skeeter gets to be a writer and succeed and quit bad jobs for which she is not prepared. Here presents the struggle of courageous people who did not care about the reprisals that could be taken against them, in order not to live in that torture. And my valuation for this book is 5/5 because it is the perfect book for me.

What’s your valuation for this book? I hope your opinion in the comments box and if you like this post, share it in your social networks. Thank you so much!

            See you!

Written by: Ana