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The Help (Movie Tie-In)
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Product Description
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.Product Details
- Amazon Sales Rank: #5 in Books
- Published on: 2011-06-28
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: .88 pounds
- Binding: Paperback
- 544 pages
Editorial Reviews
From Publishers Weekly
Starred Review.
Four peerless actors render an array of sharply defined black and white
characters in the nascent years of the civil rights movement. They each handle a
variety of Southern accents with aplomb and draw out the daily humiliation and
pain the maids are subject to, as well as their abiding affection for their
white charges. The actors handle the narration and dialogue so well that no
character is ever stereotyped, the humor is always delightful, and the listener
is led through the multilayered stories of maids and mistresses. The novel is a
superb intertwining of personal and political history in Jackson, Miss., in the
early 1960s, but this reading gives it a deeper and fuller power. A Putnam
hardcover (Reviews, Dec. 1). (Feb.)
Copyright © Reed Business
Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
From Bookmarks Magazine
In
writing about such a troubled time in American history, Southern-born Stockett
takes a big risk, one that paid off enormously. Critics praised Stockett's
skillful depiction of the ironies and hypocrisies that defined an era, without
resorting to depressing or controversial clichés. Rather, Stockett focuses on
the fascinating and complex relationships between vastly different members of a
household. Additionally, reviewers loved (and loathed) Stockett's
three-dimensional characters—and cheered and hissed their favorites to the end.
Several critics questioned Stockett's decision to use a heavy dialect solely for
the black characters. Overall, however, The Help is a compassionate,
original story, as well as an excellent choice for book groups.
From Booklist
Jackson,
Mississippi, in the early 1960s is a city of tradition. Silver is used at
bridge-club luncheons, pieces polished to perfection by black maids who “yes,
ma’am,” and “no, ma’am,” to the young white ladies who order the days. This is
the world Eugenia “Skeeter” Phelan enters when she graduates from Ole Miss and
returns to the family plantation, but it is a world that, to her, seems ripe for
change. As she observes her friend Elizabeth rudely interact with Aibileen, the
gentle black woman who is practically raising Elizabeth’s two-year-old daughter,
Mae Mobley, Skeeter latches ontothe idea of writing the story of such fraught
domestic relations from the help’s point of view. With the reluctant assistance
of Aibileen’s feisty friend, Minny, Skeeter manages to interview a dozen of the
city’s maids, and the book, when it is finally published, rocks Jackson’s world
in unimaginable ways. With pitch-perfect tone and an unerring facility for
character and setting, Stockett’s richly accomplished debut novel inventively
explores the unspoken ways in which the nascent civil rights and feminist
movements threatened the southern status quo. Look for the forthcoming movie to
generate keen interest in Stockett’s luminous portrait of friendship, loyalty,
courage, and redemption. --Carol Haggas
Customer Reviews
Most helpful customer reviews 1177 of 1234 people found the following review helpful.
A New Classic for America
By Eileen
Granfors
A new classic has been born. Kathryn Sockett's "The Help"
will live in hearts and minds, be taught in schools, be cherished by readers.
The three women who form its core, idealistic Skeeter, loving Aibileen, and
sarcastic, sassy Minny, narrate their chapters each in a voice that is
distinctive as Minny's caramel cake no one else in Jackson, Mississippi, can
duplicate.
These stories of the black maids working for white women in
the state of Mississippi of the 60s have an insiders' view of child-rearing,
Junior League benefits, town gossip, and race relations.
Hilly is the
town's white Queen Bee with an antebellum attitude towards race. She hopes to
lead her minions into the latter part of the century with the "enlightened" view
of making sure every home in Jackson, Mississippi, has a separate toilet for the
help. Her crusade is, she says, based on clear hygienic criteria, which will
save both blacks and whites from heinous diseases.
Despite the fact that
the maids prepare the food, care for the children, and clean every part of every
home, privy to every secret, many of the white women look at their black maids
as an alien race. There are more enlightened views, especially those of Skeeter,
a white, single woman with a college degree, who aspires to more than earning
her MRS. Skeeter begins collecting the maids' stories. And the maids themselves
find the issue of race humiliating, infuriating, life-controlling. Race sows
bitter seeds in the dignity of women who feel they have no choices except to
follow their mamas into the white women's kitchens and laundries. Aibilene says,
"I just want things to be better for the kids." Their hopes lie in education and
improvement, change someday for their children.
There is real danger for
the maids sharing their stories as well as danger for Skeeter herself. The death
of Medgar Evers touches the women deeply, making them question their work and a
decision to forge ahead, hoping their book can be published anonymously and yet
not recognized by the very white women they know to the last deviled egg and
crack in a dining room table.
The relationships between the maids and
the white children, the maids and some kind employers, including "white trash"
Cecilia Foot, illuminate the strange history of the South. The love Aibileen
shows for Mae Mobley matches the love Skeeter felt as a white child from her
maid-nanny Constantine.
There is never a dull moment in this long book.
It is compulsively readable while teaching strong truths about the way the
United States evolved from a shameful undercurrent of persistent racism to the
hopes and dreams of Martin Luther King and Rosa Parks. Ultimately, will the next
generations children learn (and be taught) that skin color is nothing more than
a wrapping for the person who lives within?
2565 of 2698 people found the following review helpful.
The Best Book in Years! An Instant Classic!
By JK8
The Help is about a young white woman in the early
1960s in Mississippi who becomes interested in the plight of the black ladies'
maids that every family has working for them. She writes their stories about
mistreatment, abuse and heartbreaks of working in white families' homes, all
just before the Civil Rights revolution. That is the story in a nutshell - but
it is so much more than just stories.
This is the best book I have read
in years! I can't recommend it enough! It is fabulous and I think they will make
a movie out of it. I would compare it to the writings of Carson McCullers,
Harper Lee, Truman Capote and even Margaret Mitchell. The story grabs you and
doesn't let you go. You can smell the melted tar on the Mississippi roads, the
toil in the cotton fields, the grits burning on the stove. The theme is the
indomitable will of human beings to survive against all odds - because of the
color of their skin. It is a heart-wrenching account and you will never fondly
remember the times of the Jim Crow laws (if you ever did). The pure, down and
out bitchery of the white ladies who become dissatisfied with their maids and
proceed to ruin their lives is portrayed vividly. The desperation of the maids'
circumstances is truly touching. I have laughed and cried my way through this
book and plan to re-read it. I highly recommend this book because it is going to
be talked about as the best book of the year.
629 of 681 people found the following review helpful.
a treasure of a book
By Karen M.
Gallo
I was lucky enough to come across an advanced reader copy of
this book. Set in Mississippi during the civil rights movement, the story is
narrated by the three principal characters...Minny and Aibileen, two black
maids, and Miss Skeeter, a young, white woman newly graduated from college. The
characters are wonderfully developed, as are the historical background and
setting. As each character took her turn at narrating, she became my favorite
character until the next one took over again.I was torn between not being able
to put the book down and not wanting it to end.
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