I get by with a little help from...the help? (The Help by Kathryn Stockett)

I was recommended The Help by Kathryn Stockett several months ago by a lady I sat next to at a training class for my after-school tutoring job. She said it was the best book she had read in several years, which I doubted I would say since I read a lot of great books. But I decided to give this book a chance, and I was not disappointed. It was a fantastic book.

I love historical fiction, despite the fact that most of it is terrible. The Help focuses on one of my favorite periods of American History, the Civil Rights Movement. It takes place in Mississippi, a hot bed of civil rights activities, in 1964. The story revolves around a young Ole Miss graduate named Eugenia but called Skeeter, who was too tall and too immersed in her education at Ole Miss to catch a husband, which was her mother's greatest desire (my mother's too, I suppose). Skeeter wants to be a journalist, so she starts out by writing the weekly housekeeping column in the Jackson newspaper. Unfortunately, Skeeter knows nothing about keeping house, since she grew up with Help.

So Skeeter asks her friend Elizabeth's maid, Aibileen, to help her write the column. From there, Skeeter gets the idea to write a book about what it is like to be The Help in Mississippi. She asks Aibileen to tell her stories, and it takes a lot of convincing. 1964 Mississippi did not look highly upon those stirring up the status quo, particularly white women.

It's hard to imagine a world where segregation and racism so pervades the daily lives of everyone. I did grow up in the South, and vestiges of that racism still exist. People down here still call it "The War of Southern Independence," after all. This book, however, gives a different look to the impact of the Civil Rights movement. You hear in school and in American History classes about all the important civil rights leaders- Martin Luther King, Rosa Parks, Medgar Evers...you can list as many as you want. What you don't hear in history class is the impact of the civil rights movement on those who had to go to work everyday for white women or white men. The hotter the civil rights movement got, the worse they were treated, at least in the Deep South.

Stockett provides an interesting perspective, by telling her story from the points of view of Skeeter, Aibileen, and another maid named Minny. From the very beginning, the consequences of breaking the status quo is clear, and by the end of the book those consequences are made real.

Go read this book. RIGHT NOW.

Until next time, Happy Reading!