Book review: 'The Help'

By Chelsea Johnson

Thursday, October 22, 2009

In Kathryn Stockett’s, The Help, true bonds are formed amongst women shattered by discrimination and hatred.

Miss Skeeter is a twenty-two-year-old living at home in 1962 after graduating from Ole Miss with a degree in English. She is desperately searching to find her place in the segregated community of Jackson, Miss., and it is through writing and her best friends’ black maids (the “help”) that Miss Skeeter finally finds an escape from the fabricated lifestyle she has reluctantly grown accustomed to.

The final string for Skeeter irrevocably breaks when she realizes how differently she perceives the segregation taking place around her than her mother and best friends. She knows she has to do something, and a vision comes to her: she will write a book based on interviews of black maids in Jackson. This task ends up being much harder than she anticipated because the maids are well aware of the danger involved in intrusting a white woman with their true, private stories containing white women Miss Skeeter knows very well.

Skeeter eventually gains the trust of Aibileen, her best friend Elizabeth’s maid. At first, Aibileen is very suspicious of Miss Skeeter and backs out of the deal a few times before her infuriation about the segregation transpiring around her builds up so much she knows she has to do something. With a tremendous helping hand from Aibileen, Skeeter rounds up other maids in the community to tell their stories, including Aibileen’s best friend, Minny.

The Help switches between different points of views amongst Aibileen, Minny and Skeeter. The women form a covenant and Miss Skeeter goes against everything she has ever known by turning her back to her racist, white friends in order to help the maids get their stories out there.

The Help is a truly stunning novel which reveals the reality of the South during this controversial time period. Heartbreaking at times, the novel has a satisfactory ending, leaving the reader with an array of hope for change.

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