REVIEW: "The Help"

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”.

Credits to Goodreads.com

REVIEW:

With her novel The Help, which spent lots of weeks in the top of The New York Times’ Best Seller List, Kathryn Stockett brings to life the southern Jackson (Mississippi) in the sixties. During that period, Afro-American citizens didn´t have lots of rights and were treated like scum.

The novel focuses in the lives of the Afro-American women who served in white families’ houses, where they cooked, cleaned and were in charge of the kids. The novel contains 34 chapters and the three main characters that have the opportunity to tell their stories are Skeeter, a young white woman that aspires to be a writer, Aibileen and Minny, two Black maids.

I came across this book when I was taking a course in Afro-American literature and certainly, after having studied their history, I thought the novel was endearing and that it describes perfectly what the Black Community was going through during that period.

Honestly, what I loved the most about Stockett´s novel is the structure. As mentioned before, the story is told by three female characters:

Skeeter is a white young lady that has just finished university and wants to defy the typical future that awaits her and be a writer. The girl decides she doesn´t want to spend the rest of her live writing recipes and tricks to be the perfect housewife in a newspaper´s weekly-column, so she starts writing a book that reports the situation of the help, as she was raised by a lovely Black woman who was like a second-mother for her.

Minny is a strong, sassy black woman who works as a maid. She has a really strong personality and that is what causes her lots of trouble. She also has to deal with a husband that beats her all the time.

Aibileen is best-friends with Minny. She lost her son in a work accident.  Furthermore, she is in charge of the little ones in the white families’ houses, as their mothers are too busy organizing social events. After feeling brutally humiliated by her boss and her friends, Aibileen is the first maid to share her story with Skeeter, so that she can write the book.  

The Help is full of emotional moments that shows the reader the horrible situation that Black citizens had to endure, but also the kindness and light of humans in certain moments. To put it in a nutshell, I really enjoyed the novel. Stockett introduces three heroines that are really different but fight to get the same goal in sexist and racist times: freedom to express themselves.