Review # 29: The Help by Kathryn Stockett

Description: (from Amazon)

     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.

Review:
     I would recommend The Help by Kathryn Stockett to anyone who enjoys a well-written novel! I was slightly skeptical at first, because I don't usually follow the "book hype" that surfaces when a book transitions into a movie, but I couldn't put it down! The characters were brilliant, as were their witty southern dialects; and the plot was engrossing, and fully immersed the reader into the South of the 1960's. I am a bit of a book critic, and I found The Help to be quite an impressive view of segregated living in the South.


Rating: On the Run (4.5/5)


*** I received this book from The Harford County Public Library.