Book Review: The Help

The Help by Kathryn Stockett

My review

rating: 5 of 5 stars
Loved this book. I read it in about 3 days and didn't want to put it down. Stockett verbalized many of the feelings I have about the inequalities that exist in our everyday lives. This book made me laugh and cry, it me feel angry and impatient and also made me resolve to be better towards others and perhaps more honest in my relationships. This last idea is a tricky one because I don't think we always love others, we often feel pity for or superior to someone or we don't feel like we are good enough. This book touches all those emotions and makes you think about what's really in your heart.

I think that Howell Raines's Pulitzer Prize-winning article, "Grady's Gift" describes our society and the struggles we have even today. He is writing of the South but that are many socio-economic prejudices in all of our lives no matter where we live.

"There is not trickier subject for a writer from the South than that of affection between a black person and a white one in the unequal world of segregation. For the dishonesty upon which a society is founded makes every emotion suspect, makes it impossible to know whether what flowed between two people was honest feeling or pity or pragmatism."

A black man, after living in California for some time, remarked that he would rather live in the South than in the West because in the South he knew his place. In the West he couldn't tell how people REALLY felt about him. I have thought a lot about his comment.

I appreciated Stockett's enunciation of some "female tendencies", first, "herd mentality" meaning so many women all try to be and do the same things as everyone around them and second, the common tendency of women to be nice but not truly a friend.

For me the main message of the book was given by Miss Skeeter when she watches a friend drive away and says, "There is so much you don't know about a person. I wonder if I could've made her days a little bit easier, if I'd tried. If I'd treated her a little nicer. 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." Of course this is the same message found in Uncle Tom's Cabin, but I think it's good to be reminded of it.
Recommended to me by : Angela Fletcher
I would recommend this book to: My book club, Jennie, Peggy, Kelly, Stephanie, Donna, Junae, Ana.

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