The Help

Working in publishing I spend a lot of time around books. I write about books. I talk about books. I read about books. I wish I read books at work, but alas, I am not in my dream job. Someday maybe someone will pay me to read books...*sigh*

One book I've seen getting a lot of hype over the past few months is Kathryn Stockett's The Help. A quick Google search will reveal over 2 million search results. It is currently #1 at the top of the New York Times Bestseller list for hardcover fiction. As a first time novelist she has what every author only dreams of - a dynamite book that is spreading because it's so powerful and it's about women who will obviously talk to other women like I'm doing right now. It's causing book groups across the country to get out their Kleenex and laugh at the same time.

Well, let me tell you, the reviews for this striking and rare book are not kidding. I just finished reading my copy of The Help on Friday night, just days after I started the 450 page tome. I literally could not stop reading it. I went to bed wayyyy too late every night (and skipped my exercise the next morning) to read this book. If I had two minutes I would sit down and read a page or two.

If you're not familiar with the premise of the book, I'll give you a quick overview. Jackson, Mississippi in the mid-1960s. Extreme black and white segregation and the beginnings of the civil rights movement. Mainly the book focuses on black domestic house servants and their relationships with the white women they work for, the ones they love and hate. The main character, Skeeter, is a white 20-something who has just graduated from college with a degree in journalism. She comes home and to her surprise her family's black maid Constantine (the woman who literally raised her) has disappeared and no one will tell her where or why she went. Skeeter starts to dig a little deeper, finds some old Jim Crow laws and has her eyes opened to what the life of a black housekeeper is really like. She takes a huge risk and befriends Aibileen, another black housekeeper, and they start writing a book, The Help, about the lives of domestic servants in Jackson. If you have any idea what that meant for a white woman and a black servant to write a book together in the 1960s in Jackson (and I really didn't) then you will get the rest of the book and the challenges they face. A host of other interesting characters and expert writing by Stockett will launch you out of your complacency and help you understand better a critical part of American history.

The book is not a true story, but is roughly based on Stockett's own life of growing up white in Jackson in the 1960s and being raised by a black woman she adored more than her own mother. When she moved to New York City after college she finally began to understand the gap in her life story when it came to her relationship with her black maid and what that woman's life must have been like.

This book is completely eye-opening. It's humbling as a white person to read and to think that at one point in our history my ancestors treated people so terribly just because they are black. And this only 25 years before I was born! This is not the Civil War, but civil rights. It's in a way a commentary on how far we've come as a country and how much further we have to go. It's amazing how Stockett writes these characters -- you feel like they are real and you know them. You are nervous for them. Anxious, excited, scared.

So there you have it, a quick review on a book that I know I will be thinking about for a long time. If you have a chance to pick this book up (or live close to me and want to borrow my copy) I suggest that you do.