The Help | Kathryn Stockett | Review

The Help | Kathryn Stockett | Review

• Sunday, 25 November 2012

“You is kind, you is smart, you is important.”

The Help is set in 1962 in Jackson, Mississippi. The story is told from three different people’s points of view. Aibileen is looking after her seventeenth white child and trying to ignore the pain inside her from her own son’s death. Then we have Minny, a very sassy and loud mouthed woman who is the help for Hilly Holbrook, a nasty piece of work. Our final narrator is Miss Skeeter, a woman who is more passionate about having a job as a journalist instead of having a husband. Who would know that these three different people would become such good friends?

Skeeter is the only white girl who acts as a narrator in the book whilst the other two women work as the help for wealthy families, the women of which are Skeeter’s friends. What Skeeter doesn’t know is that her friends treat the help badly compared with how she treated her help Constantine, who has mysteriously gone missing. When Hilly Holbrook starts to talk about creating separate bathrooms for the help, Skeeter starts to see the inequality, and wants to do something about it. After talking with a publisher in New York, Skeeter is on a mission to show people what really goes on behind closed doors. But she needs Minny’s and Aibileen’s help. It’ll be a risky and dangerous task but can they do it? You’ll just have to find out!

I love The Help so much. I read it in April of this year and could not put the book down. It was one of the most serious books I’ve read. What I mean by serious, is that it was a book that really made me think of equality and how it’s changed over the years. I know that inequality still goes on nowadays, but it’s significantly improved compared to how people were treated fifty years ago, purely because their skin colour was not white. The story line was just brilliant and I had to keep reading to know what happened next.

The characters in this book were brilliant. She really made the good characters, such as Aibileen, Minny and Skeeter really likable, whereas every time I read a scene with Hilly Holbrook, I really just wanted to punch her in the face. The author mentions at the end that she had her own experiences with a maid helping around the house, so it was clear to see that this was a story from the heart.

Some people might not like The Help, purely based on how Aiblileen’s and Minny’s chapters were written. The author wrote these chapters based on how she believed Aibileen and Minny spoke, so there are a lot of words and phrases that are spelt differently. I personally really liked the writing styles because it made each chapter different and really highlighted how different each woman was from the other.

So I’m going to have to give The Help by Kathryn Stockett a massive five star rating. It wasn't something that I usually read but I was genuinely surprised at how much I loved it. I will definitely read it again and again (and again.) I really recommend all of you bookworms out there to give it a go. Add it to your Christmas list now!

This review was written by regular reviewer, Lucy, get to know her here

Picture from Lucy Donnan