The Help

This was our last book club book and I liked it very much. In fact I couldn't put it down. Here is the synopsis from Kathryn Stockett's website:

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.

My clubbers agreed that it was a great book but one person commented that Stockett wrote it like she knew it would get optioned for a movie (and it has.) My take on it is that it is very plot driven - not that there's anything wrong with that. Stockett writes well and I felt her character development was fine, but if you're looking for an esoteric Pulitzer prize winner this probably isn't it. If you want to read about the black domestic help in the 60's in Mississippi and about characters so compelling that you can't put the book down, then you need to read it. (Sorry, I can't give you my copy - I borrowed it from the library.)

Interestingly, the one clubber that didn't care so much for this book is a 40 year old southern woman from Mississippi who grew up with the scenario depicted in the book. She acted very defensively and felt the author should have included story lines in which the white families were shown to have treated their help very well, as she claims hers did. Stockett did actually include some accounts of just that and we pointed that out to her. Halfheartedly she agreed, still feeling the story was a sensational misrepresentation of the true relationship between the families and their hired help. No doubt many white southern families did treat their domestics well (the doctor I work with told me many a tale of how is family supported their help in ways both financial and emotional), but in my mind that doesn't compensate for or remove the despicable racism and inequality that defined their lives. Those of us alive during the 60s can attest to the attitudes of many white southerners to the black folks in their towns. It warn't pretty.