by charby

Created on: June 25, 2010

I remember buying this in Waterstones about six months ago after reading the back and being intrigued by the subject matter and the beautiful writing style of the excerpt on the back. The Help is set in 1960’s Mississippi, and so unsurprisingly revolves around the racial divide and de jure segregation of the southern states of America during this decade and the slow changes which led to more integration. I studied the American Civil Rights Movement at school as part of my History AS Level, and although I have forgotten much of what I learned, the town of Jackson in Mississippi (where this book is set) rang a bell in my mind of being important to the movement, and I was interested to reacquaint myself with this period.

The Help is written from the point of view of three different characters in Jackson: Aibileen, a fifty-something year old black maid who works for a white family whose child she grows to think of as her own; Minny, Aibileen’s best friend who often finds it difficult to keep her maid jobs for long; and Skeeter, a white woman in her early twenties who returns to Jackson after being away at university and finds that she does not share the racist opinions of the rest of her town. Each chapter is written from the point of view of one of these characters and we see how their very different lives interweave with each others’ in a way that is almost dangerous.

Kathryn Stockett’s first novel is one that is as beautifully written as it is compelling, with all the characters feeling alive to the reader even if it is difficult to imagine how it must be to live as they do. As someone who has never been to the southern states of the USA I felt that I got a real feel for how the place looked, felt and even smelled, with the intense heat present even in the winter months being a theme running through the novel.

One of the most interesting things about this book, for me, was how important a role social behaviour and class played in life in Jackson, and even being white didn’t guarantee acceptance by the town’s social elite. The character of the town’s Queen Bee and Skeeter’s childhood friend, Hilly, was a very interesting one, and despite the fact that she seemed fairly two-dimensional at the start of the book, her character was developed subtly throughout the novel and she became an interesting person to read about. In contrast, there are other white women in the book who are ostracised from the inner circle

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