Yay or Nay? Yay! (78%)

 

Consensus: Although this is yet another story about down-on-their-luck African-Americans whose best hope for a better life comes in the form of a nice, white woman, the author uses the story to expose the ugly truth about racism and injustice at a time when civil rights were just a dream.

Genres: Fiction | Literary | Literature & Fiction | Teen History & Historical Fiction | Teens | World Literature

Description: Be prepared to meet three unforgettable women:
 
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. … [more]

Shop online for “The Help” by Kathryn Stockett:

12 Book Reviews for “The Help” by Kathryn Stockett

• Stockett writes with humor and grace, with a natural feel for the rhythms of Southern life and with — most crucially — an awareness of how social change, no matter how sweeping, always comes down to the changing of minds and hearts one at a time.
  Published the 2nd day of May, 2010 in Chicago Tribune | Reviewed by Julia Keller | Full Review
  
• Stockett skillfully interweaves her characters’ stories, capturing their courage, fear, and pride…. A book driven by guilt could have been mawkish, but Stockett’s ear for both outrage and humor and her earnest efforts to correct stereotypes pay off.
  Published the 4th day of March, 2009 in The Christian Science Monitor | Reviewed by Heller McAlpin | Full Review
  
• Optimistic, uplifting debut novel … set during the nascent civil rights movement in Jackson, Miss., where black women were trusted to raise white children but not to polish the household silver…. Assured and layered, full of heart and history.
  Published the 1st day of December, 2008 in Publishers Weekly
  
• Southern whites’ guilt for not expressing gratitude to the black maids who raised them threatens to become a familiar refrain. But don’t tell Kathryn Stockett because her first novel is a nuanced variation on the theme that strikes every note with authenticity. In a page-turner that brings new resonance to the moral issues involved, she spins a story of social awakening as seen from both sides of the American racial divide…. She unsparingly delineates the conditions of black servitude a century after the Civil War.
  Published the 1st day of April, 2009 in The Washinton Post | Reviewed by Sybil Steinberg | Full Review
  
• Skeeter’s coming of age, the bitter seed of resentment growing in Aibileen and Minny and the heartless cruelty of one of Jackson’s “outstanding” citizens allows Stockett to build a novel whose heartbeat is injustice, indignation and cultural change. Her pitch-perfect depiction of a country’s gradual path toward integration will pull readers into a compelling story that doubles as a portrait of a country struggling with racial issues.
  Published the 4th day of March, 2009 in USA Today | Reviewed by Carol Memmott | Full Review
  
• “The Help” could have turned out goofily earnest or shamefully offensive. Instead, it’s graceful and real, a compulsively readable story of three women who watch the Mississippi ground shifting beneath their feet as the words of men like Martin Luther King Jr. and Bob Dylan pervade their genteel town.
  Published the 11th day of February, 2009 in Entertainment Weekly | Reviewed by Karen Valby | Full Review
  
• A tale of women’s lives that has its antecedents in books like “The Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood” or “The Joy Luck Club”. Full of plot twists and sly humor, The Help is what you might call an old-fashioned page turner.
  Published the 8th day of February, 2009 in California Literary Review | Reviewed by Elinor Teele | Full Review
  
• Ultimately, The Help can’t decide if it’s modern Faulkner or pop lit with some racial lessons thrown in for fiber…. Stockett’s keen sense of the absurd, though often tipping into melodrama, is refreshing in an account of Southern racial dynamics — a topic not known for its humor…. And then there’s the matter of a white author writing black voices. As an African American, I accept black idioms as an aesthetic choice, but they nonetheless grated.
  Published the 8th day of February, 2009 in Ms. Magazine | Reviewed by Erin Aubry Kaplan
  
• The novel is a complex, immaculately structured but tremendously convincing nest built from secrets and lies. At some stages it resembles a Feydeau farce,… but there are also moments of real emotional heft, too…. The many relationships between the large cast of characters is perfectly captured, and there is layer after layer of irony to excavate…. Most impressive – and attractive – is the blend of rage and humour with which she writes and that is what makes this novel at once so horrifying yet so savagely funny.
  Published the 24th day of July, 2009 in The Telegraph | Reviewed by Toby Clements | Full Review
  
• The first thing that happened when I started reading The Help was that a teensy bit of voice escaped from my lips. A vocal gasp. The second thing that happened was an ear-to-ear grin, followed closely by a batch of freshly sprung tears. And all this within the first two pages…. Unpredictable, perfectly paced, thoughtfully constructed and stunningly voiced, Stockett is a true master of storytelling.
  Published the 22nd day of June, 2009 in Australian Women Online | Reviewed by Tania McCartney | Full Review
  
• I wasn’t ten pages into … “The Help” before I … was completely caught up in the marvelous narrative she lays out…. It’s wise, literate, and ultimately deeply moving, a careful, heartbreaking novel of race and family that digs a lot deeper than most novels on such subjects do.
  Published in October, 2009 in Open Letters Monthly | Reviewed by Rita Consalvos | Full Review
  
• Button-pushing…. The trouble on the pages of Skeeter’s book is nothing compared with the trouble Ms. Stockett’s real book risks getting into. Here is a debut novel by a Southern-born white author who renders black maids’ voices in thick, dated dialect…. It’s a story that purports to value the maids’ lives while subordinating them to Skeeter and her writing ambitions…. After your wrestling match with this problematic but ultimately winning novel,… when it comes to the love-hate familial bond between Ms. Stockett and her subject matter, she’s telling the truth.
  Published the 18th day of February, 2009 in The New York Times | Reviewed by Janet Maslin | Full Review
  

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This entry was posted on Sunday, February 7th, 2010 at 10:55 AM and is filed under:
Fiction, Literary, Literature & Fiction, Teen History & Historical Fiction, Teens, World Literature.

Tags: Australian Women Online, book review, California Literary Review, Carol Memmott, Chicago Tribune, Elinor Teele, Entertainment Weekly, Erin Aubry Kaplan, Heller McAlpin, Janet Maslin, Julia Keller, Karen Valby, Kathryn Stockett, literary criticism, Ms. Magazine, Open Letters Monthly, Publishers Weekly, Rita Consalvos, Sybil Steinberg, Tania McCartney, The Christian Science Monitor, The Help, The New York Times, The Telegraph, The Washinton Post, Toby Clements, USA Today

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