Book: The Help by Kathryn Stockett

The setting of this novel is Jackson, Mississippi in the sixties. It is about black maids (the help) and their white, mostly young, women employers. They are day maids; they come in and clean, cook, do the laundry, endlessly polish the silver, and raise and love the young children in these homes. They are often treated despicably; they are considered barely human. Blacks, to many southerners, were inferior in so many ways and were to be kept at a remove to protect white society...or something. I still don't get it, but I wasn't born and raised in that culture. I also know there were exceptions, and that it remains a complex, sophisticated, ongoing history.

This is a story of how one young white woman, newly graduated from Ole Miss, begins to question what is right before her eyes, what has always been a given in her life, and how she becomes a power of one in her small world.

I kept thinking, as I read the book, that this all happened in my lifetime, not a century ago and not in some other country. While I knew, of course, of the civil rights movement, of the large events that defined that time in the south, this novel describes the lives of blacks, always living in fear of white reprisals and whims, all the while maintaining their separate homes, churches and communities, always working hard to keep families intact, taking comfort from each other and, finally, in this novel, finding a voice.

It is also a portrait of the deep south with its politics, its heat and humidity, its history and social mores, including the proper ways for young white women to conduct their lives in the mid 20th century. There are wonderfully believable characters, especially Aibileen and Minny, two of the help...and Hilly, the archetype racist of that era, who insists that the bathrooms the maids use be outside of the homes and which she calls her Home Help Sanitation Initiative.

There is a wonderful chapter titled The Benefit, which is an account of the annual Junior League dinner dance, but all the other chapters are written from the perspectives of Minny, Aibileen or Ms. Skeeter (the recent Old Miss graduate).

"This heartbreaking story is a stunning debut..." from The Atlanta Journal-Constitution (Sarah Sacha Dollacker.)

Read it; you'll probably like it....