The Book: The Help, by Kathryn Stockett

The Story: This is the story of the 1960’s in the deep south.  More specifically what it was like to be a black maid during this time of racial upheaval. There are three points of view represented: an older maid who is alone in the world after white bosses killed her son, a younger maid who has a large family and an abusive husband, and a white woman who from the get-go realizes that how these women are treated is just not right.

Skeeter, the white woman, has recently graduated from college and come back home *gasp* without being engaged.  What she wants more than anything is to be a writer. A newspaper writer, a novelist, it really doesn’t matter.  Moving back home is tough and her mom is completely overbearing. All of her friends are the rich young white women in Jackson, Mississippi, and she is just kind of over them.  Over the course of a few bridge clubs and Junior League meetings, she just becomes blown away by the way her friends treat their help.  One of the women, Hilly, is worse than the rest and is leading a campaign to get all the white families to build separate bathrooms so they don’t have to use the same toilet as their maids, who have diseases that “only the help carries because it is drawn to their dark pigmentation” or something like that.  All of this gets Skeeter fired up.

I don’t want to give too much away because I am so glad that I went in knowing nothing! Suffice to say that a couple maids let Skeeter into their lives a little more and Skeeter uses that as a platform to try and make change.  In race relations. In Jackson, Mississippi. In 1964.  Eeek.

What I Thought: First off, let me say that in the book jacket it says that this is Kathryn Stockett’s first novel. Amazing. I can’t wait to see what else she comes up with.  This does not read like a first novel in any way.  She got in there went for it.  It paid off.  This book was incredible.

I think that her best decision was to have three different narrators.  I’ve seen this idea played out a lot of times, but usually it’s just annoying.  A lot of time it leads to confusion and the voices aren’t really that different.  In this case, she just did a great job with it.  Having the two maids and the one white women made it so much easier to see this tough situation from a lot of different eyes.  It isn’t cut and dry.  Some of the white families were really good to their help and true friendships formed.  Some of the families were awful, and the maids were rebellious.  And just to see Skeeter’s innocence of it all and to see her eyes being opened was really beautiful.

With the maid narrators, she did take on a dialect, which is also a risky move.  It was tough for the first page or so to get that “voice” in my head, but once I did it just flowed.  Again, this can sometimes come off sounding fake and stupid, but the author did a great job and by page 10, I had totally forgotten that these sections were written any differently. It just “sounded” like the maids to me.

The thing that I kept coming back to in my  mind is that this wasn’t 200 years ago. Or 100 years ago. It was 50.  This was my parent’s lifetime. That is so wild to me.  I know that there are still serious race issues in our country, but I’d like to think that we’ve come a long way from building separate bathrooms in the garage.  It’s just unreal to think that that was so recent.  It’s kind of heartbreaking.

And that’s the thing: this book made me see one little chunk of our history through new eyes.   It made me curious and I wanted to know more. That’s what historical fiction should do, and it did a good job.

So. You get it. I’m starting to gush.

Conclusion: Read this book. Seriously. So good. I recommend without reservation.