Today’s book review is The Help by Kathryn Stockett. Written in 2009 and now a major motion picture.
“Enter a vanished world: Jackson, Mississippi, 1962.
Where black maids raise white children, but aren’t trusted not to steal the silver….
There’s Aibileen, raising her seventeenth white child and nursing the hurt caused by her own son’s tragic death; Minny, whose cooking is nearly as sassy as her tongue; and white Miss Skeeter, home from college, who wants to know why her beloved maid has disappeared.
Skeeter, Aibileen and Minny. No one would believe they’d be friends; fewer still would tolerate it. But as each woman finds the courage to cross boundaries, they come to depend and rely on one another. Each is in search of a truth. And together they have and extraordinary story to tell…”
The Help has not been without controversy. There have been a lot of discussions about the appropriateness of a white woman writing in the dialect of a black maid from the 60s, and how authentic that voice could ever be. I have to admit, it was the first thing that struck me about the book. I kept saying to my friends, ‘I don’t think it’s right. It just doesn’t feel right when I know this was written by a white person.’
The good news is: I soon got over this. The characters are so rich, enjoyable and entertaining that you forget about the voice and become totally absorbed in the story. Skeeter is the woman I hope I would have been during the civil rights movement. She begins to look at her friends like an outsider and she sees people, not coloured people, when she speaks to the help. Aibileen is wise, funny, and has a big heart. She is still carrying the hurt from the loss of her son and throws her love towards the children she cares for. Minny is as tall as her mouth is big. She is known for her frankness and is trapped in an abusive relationship with a man she just can’t seem to stop having babies with.
One of the big successes of the book is that the characters are equally entertaining. We have all read multiple POV novels where we can’t wait to get back to a certain character. Stockett has created characters that you are sad to leave in each chapter, but they are all equally entertaining.
The story is well paced, warm, and at times heartbreaking. I felt continually confronted by the thought that these events took place only 50 years ago. It is glaringly obvious that it’s written by a white person and that is ok. Because, really, that’s what it is: a white woman trying to understand what her own maid was thinking in a time when the ‘coloured’ help had different bathrooms in their employer’s homes. The only way Stockett could have delved deeper into the ugliness of the time would have been to drop the black characters perspective, because a more in-depth analysis with the existing points of view would never have been as authentic. Then we would have been left with the story a white woman’s feelings about racial segregation, and the book would not have been as enjoyable as it is without Aibileen and Minny.
Rating: 4/5 Worms
