The Help tells the story of a group of black maids and the
white women they work for in a small town in Mississippi. Aibileen works with a
family with a young child. She’s very good with children and always tries to
emphasize to the children that skin colour is not important. Her own son has
died recently and she’s found herself in a rut. Minny has trouble keeping a job
as she keeps talking back to her employers. She also did something awful to the
daughter of her last employer that got her fired and saw she wouldn’t get a job
in the town. Luckily, there is a lady who has recently moved to the town and
Minny manages to convince her to employ her. Eugenia ‘Skeeter’ Phelan has
returned home after graduating from college to find her old maid gone. She
wants to know why. She gets to thinking about the differences between the black
and white people in her town. When she discovers Aibileen’s son was going to
write about this topic before he died, she decides to take up his project. Being
white, Skeeter must convince the maids to help her. At first, only Aibileen
agrees.
Aibileen is definitely my favourite character; she is an
amazing person and a pillar of her community. She is always eager to help
others and never puts herself first. She enjoys looking after the children that
she does, but not so much their parents. Minny relies on Aibileen a lot.
Minny’s husband beats her regularly and she has five children to look after. I
admire the character of Minny because she won’t take any nonsense and says
exactly what she thinks; there’s no half measures. Skeeter dreams of being a
journalist but that isn’t likely to happen while she’s still in Mississippi.
She feels she can’t move as her mother has cancer and is very ill. The idea for
the book comes along at just the right time for her. Hilly is the leader of the
young women of the town. They all follow her example and do as she says. And
Hilly hates coloured people.
It’s difficult to fathom the extent to which segregation
changed the way people went about their business and what they did. Having more
than one toilet because if the maid uses the toilet it is ‘dirty’ and the white
family can’t use it. It’s really quite arbitrary what is and isn’t acceptable.
The white people have no qualms about the black maids washing their clothes or
cooking their food, yet won’t eat in the same room or shop in the same grocery
stores. It’s a ridiculous concept and makes no sense. Yet the black people had
no power to speak up against it.
The book is told from the point of view of Aibileen, Minny
and Skeeter. Each character has a separate personality and each is engaging to
listen to. The way the two maids are written is the way they would speak and
that adds to the feel of the book. I found myself really connecting to all of
the narrators and wanting everything to work out for them and for them to be
happy. While reading it I was so drawn in to the story that I didn’t mind, but
now I think it would have been interesting to have a couple of chapters inside
Hilly’s head. To see if there is a reason she is the way that she is and has
the views that she does.
This book was amazing and fascinating. The fifties seems to
be a new area of interest for me. I also like books where you learn things
without realising. This is one of those books; it tells you so much about the
history of Southern America. It felt very real, which it obviously was but it’s
almost like reading a biography rather than fiction. I would recommend this
book to everyone. It’s written in a way that is easy to read and makes you
think. I had seen the film a long time before I read the book, but from what I
remember the film was a reasonable adaptation. A must read book.
Overall rating 5 out of 5.
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