We are just two people. Not that much separates us. Not nearly as much as I’d thought.
Skeeter, a young college graduate, begins to ponder such thoughts in her hometown of Jackson, Mississippi. It’s 1962 and the lines are strongly drawn dividing whites and blacks. In her novel, The Help, Kathryn Stockett paints a vivid portrait of life on both sides of that divide through characters like Aibileen, a black domestic, who has spent a lifetime loving the children she tends, until those children are old enough to adopt the prejudiced beliefs of their parents. Aibileen’s friends are passionate, long suffering, sassy, smart and their experiences are alternately horrific and hilarious. Equally as fascinating are the white characters they serve and endure, the insufferable Miss Hilly and her Home Help Sanitation Initiative and the tackily dressed Miss Celia ,who wants desperately to fit in, yet cannot grasp the unwritten rules of Jackson society.
In a tempestuous time when black civil rights leaders are being murdered and the price of rebellion is often death, Skeeter embarks on a bold plan, to pen a book of stories detailing the experiences of black domestics. The risk unthinkably high; discovery will mean social annihilation for Skeeter and ruin for her black co conspirators. The characters are searingly real on both sides of the racial divide and the plot twists and unexpected revelations keep the reader mesmerized through all four hundred plus pages. Stockett’s work is graceful and vivid, a riveting journey into a world where human potential is limited but the courage to dream of a better way is not.
