This is one of the best books I have read. Set in the south it has wonderful characters who have a wonderful story to tell. A book that is hard to put down. ( )

The book tells the story of Skeeter, a university graduate who returns to her hometown in Mississippi in 1962, and the black maids she interviews about their lives as ‘the help’ to her friends, in the hopes of establishing her own career as a writer.

Some of the characters were more interesting and realistic to me than others, but the real strength of the book for me was in the way it imaginatively opened a door into another time and place, and depicted that different world in an evocative and thought-provoking manner. ( )

Nothing makes me happier than to add 5 stars next to a book title, which I will gladly do to this book...The Help. Words cannot say how much I enjoyed this story....and if you love a good southern novel complete with magnolias, sweltering heat and the ubiquitous controlling mother, then you will too. ( )

A good old fashioned well written novel set in the south in the 60s. Good read. ( )

My cousin sent me this book after she finished reading it. What a wonderful book! It was very intense and seemed true to life.

I don't have much to base that impression on because my mother never had a full-time maid, but I did go home on the bus several times with Miss Loretta, who did Mother's ironing once a week. She introduced me as "my White folks' child" and let me help her shell black-eyed peas for supper. Mother would pick me up later.

I can't remember the woman's name who ironed for Mother later in my life, but the first day she was there, we fixed a sandwich for lunch and told her we left the stuff out if she wanted one. Well, she made a sandwich and was standing at the sink. Mother asked her what she was doing. When she said she was eating her lunch, Mother told her to come sit down because she had stood up all morning ironing and needed a break. She looked uncomfortable, but after a few times, she started sitting down with us without being asked, and she used to bring sheet music once in a while to use the piano -- usually something they were doing at church. I used to talk to her a lot, too -- it was in the mid-1950s, so you can imagine our conversations.

Then Mrs. Jackson started coming in every other Saturday some time after Daddy died and was still there when Mother died. She was like part of the family. My young granddaughter even called her "Aunt Jackson" with no prompting from anyone. I was visiting Mother as much as I could so got to know Mrs. Jackson fairly well. She went with us for visitation at the funeral home when Mother died. I loved her.

That little bit of experience, along with some other things I've read, are what make me thing the book is pretty well right. I wanted it to end, so I could see what happened, but I hated for it to end, too. It was hard to put down. I'm just grateful that I was taught not to act like some of those idiot women in The Help. I can imagine how the maids must have felt listening to those women talk about them like that, and still having to work for them. The women ate the food that the maids fixed for them but didn't want to use the same bathroom -- the epitome of stupidity if you ask me.

I almost forgot Miss Sadie. When I was a small child, my grandmother had no washing machine and would do her light laundry -- dresses, underwear, etc. -- by hand. Miss Sadie would do the sheets and towels, bringing a clean set one Saturday and picking up the dirties to bring back clean the next week. I bet she did the laundry out in the back yard in a pot over a fire the way my aunt used to do many years ago. Now that I think of it, I'm not sure I really knew that Miss Sadie was Black when I was a child. Surely I did but just never thought of it.

At any rate, this is one of the best books I've read in a while. ( )

Four star rating. Highly recommend it for its characters, storyline and humanity. ( )

The Help is one of the best novels I read this year.

Three women narrators in 1960's Jackson, Mississippi alternate chapters: Skeeter, a white girl in her twenties; Aibileen, a 53-year-old black maid; and Minny, a 36-year-old black maid. The characterization in this book is marvelous. Each of the women speaks in her own dialect, voicing thoughts about her own life and about each other’s that provide a different perspective on the same events.

Aibileen works for Elizabeth, one of Skeeter’s best friends, and Minny works for the mother of her other best friend, Hilly.The maid who worked for Skeeter’s family for many years and basically raised Skeeter is gone when Skeeter returns from college; no one will tell her what happened to Constantine.

Aibileen and Skeeter both aspire to write, but are otherwise unassertive. Minny is not afraid to speak out, a habit which works to her detriment in the white community. But she is reputed to be one of the best cooks in Hinds County, a skill that helps compensate for her perceived shortcomings.

Skeeter decides she wants to write a documentary book about black maids. She convinces Aibileen and Minny to help with the secret and even dangerous project. As more people get involved, the risk spreads and the tension and suspense are heightened. But the focus is not on this fear they share, other than the fact that they must be afraid to participate. Rather, it is on the stories the maids tell about their experiences – about “what it really felt like to be a black woman in Mississippi, especially in the 1960’s.”

As the maids come to Aibileen's house at night to talk, we learn about the specific, day-to-day little acts of violence against the lives of these women by the white women who employ them: the insults to their dignity; the contempt for their common humanity; the assumption that they are somehow “diseased” and/or that blackness is contaminating or “catching”; and the hurt and frustration as they watch children in both the black and white community being infected with the old poison of racism.

Importantly, much of the racial injustice that take place in this book is portrayed as the result of specific actions taken by specific individuals; it is not ascribed to an intellectual construct (e.g., “racists”) or stewpot of behaviors (e.g., “southern racism”). Similar to the assignment of the name “Nazi,” the use of such epithets erroneously (and dangerously) implies a socially aberrant group not part of "ordinary" society and a sui generis nature to the atrocities committed. It downplays the role of individual human volition in the behavior, and denies the widespread adherence to values that enables specific individuals to perpetrate the egregious acts that are the logical extension of those values.

I also appreciated that the black population of maids highlighted in this book was not a homogenous one. They were not “just” black or “just” maids. They were very distinct individuals with different sets of problems relating to their white employers. Some even had relatively “good” employers. On they other hand, they demonstrated, as a group, the insidiously cumulative effects of generations of prejudice. For example, injustice and unequal opportunities suffered by the parents affected whether their children could go to college, or even whether the children could survive.

In a postscript, the author writes that understanding our commonality is vital to our humanity:

"In The Help there is one line that I truly prize: ‘Wasn’t that the point of the book? For women to realize, We are just two people. Not that much separates us. Not nearly as much as I’d thought.’”

Evaluation: This is a book not to be missed. ( )

Ah, here is my choice for Best Book of 2009! This book details the lives of a couple of black maids, Aibilene and Minny, who spent their lives raising white children. Also featured is a young white woman, Skeeter, who was also raised by her own beloved maid, Constantine. The book is set in the first half of the 1960's. Skeeter and the maids end up writing a book anonymously detailing the lives of a bunch of these maids in a fictional town, which is actually Jackson, Mississippi. Although author Stockett is white, she has done a wonderful job of catching the black dialect of the time and making these characters come to life on the page. I felt like I was there with these women and was amazed by their strength. I was also embarrassed that white people would deign to treat other humans the way they did the Blacks. I am too young to remember segregation and not being from the South, it never ceases to amaze me that people actually treated other people that way. While some segregation did exist in the north, it did not compare with what they had going on down in Mississippi. To be transported to another place and another time, please read this book. It's a keeper, and I plan to steer others to it. ( )

Recommended b y Don Miller. Great read! ( )

By now, most bloggers are well aware of the ample charms of this engaging novel. I was one who was initially put off by the sheer length of the book - at 450 pages, it qualifies for the Chunkster Challenge. But I am here to tell you ... I wish this could have been TWICE as long - I enjoyed the main characters that much (Minny was my favorite) - and I'd have loved to have gotten more about a lot of the side characters, especially Celia Foote, Constantine, Sugar and Kindra. ( )

Twenty-two year ol 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 til Sketter has a ring on her finger. Skeeter would normally find solace in her beloved maid, Constantine, the woman who raided her, but C has disappeared and no one will tell Skeeter where she has gone. Skeeter teams up with the black maids to write a book about the lives of black women working for white women and almost gets run out of town.
Scenic City Book Club-Feb 2010 ( )

This is one of the best books I've read in a long, long time. I was angry, sad, touched by it's sweetness and occasionally I laughed. ( )

Powerful story from start to finish. I didn't think I would like it - but couldn't put it down. Great story of 3 women - (2 black and 1 white) - captured the essence of the times and the changes that were coming. I was a child at that time growing up in the north and had no idea that this was "the way it was" down in the southern part of the United States. It really brought home how racism pervaded so much of our society - how it was just the way of life...
Stockett did an outstanding job with her characters - they really came alive. The story was tight and well written and left me wanting more - I hated to see it end. ( )

It's rare for me to finish a book and immediately want to start reading it again, but I had that reaction to The Help. Kathryn Stockett's first novel is thoroughly involving and engaging. It drew me in immediately and kept me reading compulsively; I was trying to read a couple of other books while reading this one on my Kindle, but they had to take a back seat.

I'm both drawn to and cautious about novels set in the South; drawn to them because I lived there for half of my life and still love many things about the region (flaws and all), but cautious because a lot of Southern stories seem to be almost deliberately, self-consciously "quirky," and that just annoys me. The Help takes place in that flawed but real South, not the exaggeratedly eccentric one. Its characters are well-drawn and developed, and its situations are pulled from real life in a challenging time - Jackson, Mississippi in the early 1960's, as the civil-rights movement was beginning to build. While slavery had ended nearly a hundred years earlier, the world was still black and white, and people's places in that world were pretty well fixed, while their relationships were more complex than they might appear to be. Yet change was simmering, and it scared people - even people for whom it might mean better things.

The basic plot of The Help might seem a bit unlikely, to be honest. Recent college graduate Skeeter Phelan has no marriage prospects and is actually interested in a career as a writer, but her prospects for that aren't good either. Her only opportunity is a weekly housekeeping column in the local paper...but as a white, upper-middle-class Southern girl, Skeeter has no experience with domestic chores. Like everyone she knows, her family has always had "help" - a black woman who was charged with cleaning, cooking, and child-rearing. Skeeter would ask her family's maid to help her with the column, but the maid she grew up with has mysteriously disappeared, and she hasn't gotten to know the new maid well. Instead, she obtains permission from her friend Elizabeth to go to Elizabeth's maid, Aibileen, with her questions for the column. Her conversations with Aibileen begin to open Skeeter's eyes to more than just housekeeping, and they're eye-opening for Aibileen too. Never forgetting the risks to their lives and livelihood, Aibileen and her friends begin secretly collaborating with Skeeter on a book to tell their stories.

The Help is an excellent example of a character-driven novel, and Stockett has created some vivid and indelible characters, particularly the three narrators, Aibileen, her best friend Minny, and Skeeter. I grew to love them all, but I think Minny was my favorite. Stockett made an interesting, rather controversial narrative choice in using dialect for the first-person narration by Aibileen and Minny; she also made a smart choice in writing Minny's dialect a bit differently. I didn't really find it necessary, having enough familiarity with both black and white Southern voices that I probably would have "heard" each character's voice as intended without the dialect, but not every reader will bring that experience to the book, so I think using it was effective.

I grew to love this book more as I progressed with it, I didn't want it to end, and I definitely want to read it again, although I'm not going to forget it any time soon. I'll look forward to Kathryn Stockett's next novel, but even if there isn't one, she's made a big mark on the literary world with The Help. It's a thought-provoking, well-told story with characters I cared about, and it's a novel that's going to stick.

http://www.3rsblog.com/2009/11/ebook-... ( )

Such hype this book has received, and now I know why. Told from the perspective of three Mississippi women in the 1960's (2 black & 1 white), it brings to the forefront the very deliberate but rarely discussed line between whites & blacks, specifically the relationship between black maids in white families.

I thought this was especially well-written for a debut novel. Stockett seems to really capture the southern attitudes and dialect and as the story continues, it gets harder & harder to put down. I can't find much at all negative to say about this one, except that the last chapter or two seemed a little weak to me, not quite living up to the caliber of the rest of the book. But overall, I great read and highly recommended. I read a combination of the book and audio, and would especially recommend the audio. Although I was not previously familiar with any of the readers, they were excellent. ( )

Beautifully written grasping the values of middle america in the '60's. Fully drawn characters on both sides with a feeling a real life. ( )

"The Help" refers to the hired help in the south in the 60s as well as the title of a book being written by one of the characters about the experiences of black female's who worked for white families during this volatile period of time in history. Katheryn Stockett's writing takes you to a place in time in history and immersing you in the problems facing the characters. Thoroughly enjoyed. The audio version was well read by Octavia Spencer, Bahni Turpin and Jenna Lamia. Recommended. ( )

stockett has made the political personal in "the help." she gives shading to a topic that mostly all americans are familiar with through history books and specials on pbs or the history channel. those are the quick forms we reach to when we think of the 1960's and race relations. your mind can jump to pictures of lynchings, lunch counters, hoses and police dogs. stockett's novel, though, shrinks that large political scene into something intimate. race is played out through the interactions between relatively well-off, educated white women and their relatively poor, uneducated black female workers. if this tale was told through the use of men, it would have been one of violence and aggression but this story shows the more subtle emotional and verbal "violence" of women on women.

stockett's characters are a motely crew of outsiders from skeeter who's true aim is to write and not just be a wife and mother, to celia who's marilyn monroe look shakes the conversative southern coven and minnie who just cannot keep her mouth shut. they're softened by the kindess of abilene who works hard to raise her "children" to be color-blind.

i thought it was a well-written and humorous story that showed while there was hate, there was also love between these women and that we create lines to divide when we're really all just the same! ( )

This rather beautiful books tells the story of three women, two of whom - Aibileen and Minny - are black maids working for white families in Jackson, Mississippi, in the 1960s, when racial segregation meant that black and white people could not mix socially, could not use the same restaurants, and could not go to the same hospitals or churches. The third woman is a white girl named Skeeter, who comes home from college with dreams of becoming a writer. She eventually decides to write a book about what it is like to be a black maid working for a white family, and she, Aibileen and Minny become embroiled in an exciting and potentially dangerous project.

I'm not sure I can accurately put into words how much I enjoyed this book. The three narrators' voices (Aibileen, Minny and Skeeter) come through beautifully and each character is distinct and wholly believeable. We see each character's life through their own eyes, and watch as they cope with their own problems (Aibileen is still grieving over the death of her son, and trying hard to make the young child she looks after grow up to be a nice person; Minny lives with an abusive husband and several demanding children; Skeeter has an over-bearing mother who won't explain the sudden disappearance of Skeeter's beloved childhood maid).

As well as the three central characters, there are a multitude of other people of great importance to the storyline. Hilly Holbrook is a long time friend of Skeeter's, but the bond between them is pulled very taut as the hypocritical and bigoted Hilly dislikes Skeeter's desire for awareness and change. Their other best friend, Elizabeth Leefolt, is Aibileen's boss and it is her daughter who Aibileen cares for (seemingly far more than Elizabeth does). However, my favourite of the 'supporting' players is Celia Foote - Minny's boss, who herself feels an outsider, as Hilly and her friends consider that she is not good enough to associate with them.

Historical events such as the death of JFK and Martin Luther King's famous "I have a dream" speech are covered here, adding to the already very real sense of the time in which this novel is set.

One of the things I most admired about the novel is that the author does not just show the characters as either good or bad. She shows them as totally believable people. Some of the nicer people sometimes do less-than-good things, and some of the not-so-nice characters in the book can show that they have a heart.

I loved this book, and would say it is definitely my favourite book out of all that I have read this year. It's thought-provoking, funny in places (look out for the scene with the toilets), and it made me cry in other places. I was riveted throughout; my attention was grabbed on page one, and was held right through to the last page.

Utterly fantastic read, and very strongly recommended. 10/10 ( )

It is 1962 and the world is at a volitile stage. Immediately prior to the beginning of the civil rights movement, a young college graduate - Miss Eugenia "Skeeter" Phelan - becomes interested in the plight of colored women working as maids to the elitist white women in Jackson Mississippi. "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." - (Stockett, 2009)

Ms Stockett does a good job of realistically portraying the characters, making the reader a part of the story from page one. Her antagonists (especially the hypocritical and pushy Hilly Holbrook) were so realistic I wanted to tell them where to go, just as I would do in real life with people bearing the same personalities... and I wanted to alternately hug and beat some sense into the annoyingly passive Elizabeth Leefolt. who does only what she's told instead of showing any of her own initiative. Miss Skeeter, Aibileen and Minny are, of course, to be admired for their determination and courage and daring.

Important historical events such as the murder of Medgar Evers and the assinations of Martin Luther King Jr. and John F. Kennedy were accurately placed at the times where they belong. This helped give a realistic historical sense of the times depicted as well as enhancing the story. The liberties taken with history were minor - using a couple of songs prior to the time those tunes had actually been released - which actually helped the story progress rather than working against it as a major historical flaw would have done.

The Help is one of the best new novels I've read this year - quite possibly the best of the best. It should not be missed.

This review was previously published on Dragonviews ( )

What a wonderful book! Set in the town of Jackson, Mississippi in 1962, it tells the stories of Aibileen and Minny, two black maids working for white families, and Miss Skeeter Phelan, the daughter of one such white family who decides to write a book about the lives of the helps and all the bad, and indeed good, parts of it. This is a dangerous pursuit for all involved, as life in towns like Jackson meant that they could all be sacked, beaten or worse, for their participation in the project.

Kathryn Stockett draws on her own experiences to tell the stories, and a fine job she does of it, including writing the black voices in the vernacular, which worked really well. It's hard for me to put into words how moving and inspirational this book was to read. Aibileen and Minny, and indeed all the coloured maids, were wonderfully portrayed, and that a white woman managed to do that is testament to the author's writing quality. Skeeter too goes on a journey of discovery in the book – worn down by her oppressive home and social life, she carves out a future for herself through the writing of her book.

The book made me cry towards the end, and it was truly a wrench to finish it as I enjoyed it so much. It also made me smile, in fact so many emotions went through my mind as I read it, and I highly recommend it, both as an absorbing and emotional read, and also as a slice of history that should never be forgotten. ( )

This was a great book. The characters were all wonderfully written my favorites were of course Skeeter, Aibileen, & Minny. Skeeter was so ahead of her time or should I say her city and had the strength to do something about it. I loved the humor of the toilet bowls that scene cracked me up and was so well written that I was able to picture it clearly in my head. Also some of the things the help said were so descriptive it made you feel you were in 1962 in Jackson. This book was very memorable and will stay with me awhile. The only downside was I didn’t want it to end; I wanted to know how everyone turned out. I would highly recommend this book for anyone who enjoys southern fiction and not so long ago historical fiction. ( )

This is probably the best audio book I've listened to. Not only was it a great story, very nicely written, but the narrators did a great job. I honestly wasn't sure if I would get into this story, because I live in the north and wasn't born until 1978, but I was really drawn in. I want more! I want to know what happens next! ( )

One in a line of Southern novels featuring "spunky" women....in this case, two black maids and a white college girl, returned home with "no prospects" (i. e. without a husband in sight). What sets this story apart from the rest is the project in which these three engage themselves....the truth about the lives of "colored" maids....THE HELP, as it were. a bold venture in 1962..in Jackson, Mississippi. A bold venture well told, with a minimum of hand-wringing, and only the requisite Stereotyping....The author is a dab hand at storytelling. I liked the characters who deserved such, and pitied the rest. This book won't set the world on fire, but is an enjoyable read..that left me thinking, again, about the destructive roles that Racism and Fear play in our lives..to this day.

this is a Review of an ARC. ( )