OK. Wow. Wipes Away Tears.The Help is a fictional story set in Mississippi in 1962. The perspective shifts between three characters: two black maids, Aibileen and Minnie, and a young white woman nicknamed Skeeter. Will these women be able to change the status quo and what will it cost them?First of all, the audiobook is phenomenal with a full cast of characters. It is definitely on my list of top 10 best audiobooks of all time. Second, this book made me laugh and cry. It has a very conversationa...

This is one of those few books where people have a polarising opinion. Some loved reading it, while some others detested it.Kathryn Stockett tries to tell us the story of the life of two African American housemaids named Aibileen and Minnie in Mississippi. The racism and rejection they had to face in their life and how they faced it with courage form the crux of this story. Even though the character creation of Skeeter by Stockett has some cliches, we will still like the way the author craft...

"I know what a froat is and how to fix it." Aibileen Clark knows how to cure childhood illnesses and how to help a young aspiring writer write a regular household-hints column for the local paper. But she's struggling mightily to deal with grief over the death of her 20-something son, and she SURE doesn't think conditions will ever improve for African-American domestic-engineering servants in early-1960s Jackson, Mississippi or anywhere else in the South. Aibileen's good friend Minny has been a ...

Hey so, while this book and its film adaption have long been favourites of mine I've learnt many things about privilege, racism and white saviourism since I first read this as a teenager. There are quite a few things about how this story came to be that don't sit right with me, hence I've removed my rating and I won't be promoting this any longer. If you want to know more about the reasons for this, google is your friend. The answer won't be hard to find.

The Help is a tale of lines, color, gender and class, in the Jackson, Mississippi of the early 1960s. This is a world in which black women work as domestics in white households and must endure the whims of their employers lest they find themselves jobless, or worse. It is the Jackson, Mississippi where Medgar Evers is murdered, and where spirit and hope are crushed daily. It is the Jackson, Mississippi where Freedom Riders are taken from a bus, a place where segregation and racism are core belie...

While it was a well-written effort, I didn't find it as breathtaking as the rest of the world. It more or less rubbed me the wrong way. It reads like the musings of a white woman attempting to have an uncomfortable conversation, without really wanting to be uncomfortable. It's incredibly hard to write with integrity about race and be completely honest and vulnerable. The author failed to make me believe she was doing anything beyond a show & tell. And if her intent isn't anything greater, th...

I read the first paragraph of The Help, absorbing the words, but suddenly being caught off guard by the dialect. I stopped reading.I shifted the book in my hands, flipping to the author's biography and photograph on the back of the dust jacket. Staring up at me was this: [image error]Oh, sweet Jesus, I thought. An affluent, white Manhattanite. Great. And one who apparently fancies herself a master at Southern Black Vernacular. Even better.I rolled my eyes and returned to page one, fully prepared...

I have this terrible, dreary feeling in my diaphragm area this morning, and I’m not positive what it’s about, but I blame some of it on this book, which I am not going to finish. I have a friend who is mad at me right now for liking stupid stuff, but the thing is that I do like stupid stuff sometimes, and I think it would be really boring to only like smart things. What I don’t like is when smart (or even middle-brained) writers take an important topic and make it petty through guessing about wh...

I was uncomfortable with the tone of the book; I felt that the author played to very stereotypical themes, and gave the characters (especially the African American ones) very inappropriate and obvious voices and structure in terms constructing their mental character. I understand that the author wrote much of this as a result of her experiences growing up in the south in the 1960's, and that it may seem authentic to her, and that she was even trying to be respectful of the people and the time; b...

Here is an illustrative tale of what it was like to be a black maid during the civil rights movement of the 1960s in racially conflicted Mississippi. There is such deep history in the black/white relationship and this story beautifully shows the complex spectrum, not only the hate, abuse, mistrust, but the love, attachment, dependence. Stockett includes this quote by Howell Raines in her personal except at the end of the novel: There is no trickier subject for a writer from the South than that o...