“The Help” by Kathyrn Stockett

Book Summary from the 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 REVIEW:

“The Help,” by Kathryn Stockett is a novel set in 1960’s Jackson, Mississippi, where racial segregation is normal. This book is narrated by three characters, Aibleen Clark, a middle aged Africa-American maid that helps raise seventeen white babies in her lifetime, Eugenia ‘Skeeter’ Phelan a twenty-three year-old college graduate that wants to reveal the inequality in Jackson, Mississippi through a book, and Minny Jackson, another African-American, who has a bad reputation among the white employers because of her “sass mouth.”

Skeeter’s character is pretty interesting to me, in the beginning of the book there’s conflict between her own set of values and what society wants her to be. She has to deal gender inequalities in order for her to reach her goal of a publisher.

The thing that attracted to me to this book was the setting of the book. We’ve all probably heard about civil rights, Martin Luther King Jr., Medgar Evers, and Rosa Parks and what they all did. However I never actually understood how they might have felt living in the southern part of the USA during the 1960’s. This book is definitely a page turner, and before I knew it I was done. Honestly, this book gave me so many highs and lows, because I was laughing and crying ( One of the saddest parts are  where Mae Mobley was crying because Ablieen was leaving forever!) Long story short this is a pretty good book.

I give this book 4.5/5 because it wasn’t based on a true story!