The Help
2009
- novels
- fiction
- civil rights movements
- household employees
- african american women
- literary fiction
- historical fiction
- domestic fiction
- civil rights movement
- literature
The story
Three ordinary women are about to take one extraordinary step. 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.
What it’s like
Three alternating first-person voices carry this novel, and the prose is warm, colloquial and quick, with the cadence of Southern speech in Aibileen's and Minny's chapters and a more buttoned, hopeful intelligence in Skeeter's. The sensory world is kitchens and porches in Jackson, Mississippi: heat that never quite breaks, the smell of fried chicken and starch, screen doors, the hum of a box fan, church pews, the clatter of a lunch-hour kitchen. Its vibe is bittersweet and humid, with a stubborn streak of comedy running through the grief. The rhythm is chatty and episodic, each short chapter a confession or a small scene, so it reads fast and in gulps, good for a rainy Sunday or a long train ride. Its emotional register is tender and indignant, following three women who slowly trust one another and take real risks together. The intensity is moderate: racist cruelty, verbal humiliation and a few brutal episodes of violence against Black characters, including a death that lands hard, but little graphic gore and no explicit sex. It suits readers who want a warm, character-led story about friendship and courage under oppression, and who can sit with painful history softened by humor.
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