The Help
by Kathryn Stockett
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Book Summary Information
Author: Kathryn StockettEdition: Paperback
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 2011-04-05
ISBN: 0425232204
Number of pages: 544
Publisher: Berkley Trade
Book Reviews of The Help
Book Review: ~seeing with your heart~
Summary: 5 Stars
I was rating this book five stars while it was still downloading from Audible.com. It is not only that I has such a good feeling about it and of course knew that the debut novel by a lady who grew up in a family with colored help in Mississippi enjoyed mostly rave reviews and undeniable success (there is now a movie, too!). No, I read a couple of quotes and heard a short audio abstract. I knew I would fall in love with the narrative, and yes m'am, I sure did.
"Ever morning, until you dead in the ground, you gone have to make this decision. You gone have to ask yourself, "Am I gone believe what them fools say about me today?" asks Constantine the maid, and Skeeter, her employees white baby, learns to tiny-tiny value herself.
"...and that's when I get to wondering, what would happen if I told her she something good, ever day?" wonders Aibeleen, another maid, looking at Mae Mobly covered in baby-fat and non-attention, bordering with pure disgust, of her mother.
These simple women, whose life is full of remembering their places, keeping their tongues behind their teeth and taking care of white employees and their own homes, husbands and children have huge hearts and have time and emotion to share. Children, who see with their hearts, feel it, know it, love them their nannies. The blissful babyhood isn't infinite. The time comes, and, inevitably, they hear and see and pick up the attitude that rains in the South in order to fit in safely with their families and their surroundings. "I want to yell so loud that Baby Girl can hear me that dirty ain't a color, disease ain't the Negro side a town. I want to stop that moment from coming - and it come in ever white child's life - when they start to think that colored folks ain't as good as whites. ... I pray that wasn't her moment, Pray I still got time."
Being accepted, being like everybody else around is the survivor instinct. White upper class ladies of Missisipi, even most of those who did treat their help nicely, had to survive, and I cannot really blame them, even though I really want to. Prejudices' run their roots deep into a person's mind and heart. Rarely is the Soul so big and watchful as to have enough power to weed them in time, like it happened, blissfully, with Miss Skeeter, the young girl who started gathering stories from the lives of maids and editing them. The rest of them, white ladies, just looks up to the "Queen Bee" of the most popular girl: "Miss Leefolt sigh, hang up the phone like she just don't know how her brain gone operate without Miss Hilly coming over to push the Think buttons."
There are many factors for Miss Skeeter to turn out the way she is, and I live it up to you to discover. But the true purpose for writing the book became: "For women to realize, we are just two people. Not much separates us. Not nearly as much as I thought." For Jackson, Mississippi during the early 1960s, it is a revelation.
I really want you, dear reader of my review, to get a taste of the language and the message of this thoughtful and enjoyable book. If you can, do purchase the Audible edition, the narration is so, so, so unbelievably REAL and wonderful!
"I worked for Miss Margaret thirty-eight years. She had her a baby girl with the colic and the only thing that stopped the hurting was to hold her. So I made me a wrap. I tied her up on my waist, toted her around all day with me for a entire year. That baby like to break my back. Put ice packs on it ever night and still do. But I loved that girl. And I loved Miss Margaret.
Miss Margaret always made me put my hair up in a rag, say she know coloreds don't wash their hair. Counted ever piece a silver after I done the polishing. When Miss Margaret die of the lady problems thirty years later, I go to the funeral. Her husband hug me, cry on my shoulder. When it's over, he give me a envelope. Inside a letter from Miss Margaret reading, 'Thank you. For making my baby stop hurting. I never forgot it.'
Callie takes off her black-rimmed glasses, wipes her eyes.
If any white lady reads my story, that's what I want them to know. Saying thank you, when you really mean it, when you remember what someone done for you-she shakes her head, stares down at the scratched table-it's so good."
There are moments that will make you laugh, moments that will make you angry and moments that will make your eyes shiny with tears. It is a book about Life and about our place in it and about choices we are to make every day: how to behave, what to accept and what to try to change.
And once you have done all that you felt you should have, not much is left but to pick up the traces of your life and go on following your heart: "You got nothing left here but enemies in the Junior League and a mama that's gonna drive you to drink. You done burned ever bridge there is. And you ain't never gone get another boyfriend in this town and everbody know it. So don't walk your white butt to New York, run it."
Run your butt to get the Audible copy of the book. I says so.
Victoria Evangelina Belyavskaya
Summary of The Help
Aibileen is a black maid in 1962 Jackson, Mississippi, who's always taken orders quietly, but lately she's unable to hold her bitterness back. Her friend Minny has never held her tongue but now must somehow keep secrets about her employer that leave her speechless. White socialite Skeeter just graduated college. She's full of ambition, but without a husband, she's considered a failure. Together, these seemingly different women join together to write a tell-all book about work as a black maid in the South, that could forever alter their destinies and the life of a small town...Historical Books
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