Tolog Review: The Help

The Help
by Kathryn Stockett
reviewed by Julia Swart


Aibileen Clark has raised over sixteen white children, and counting, drawing energy from nowhere but the love in her heart. She is not the mother of these children; she does this for a living. No she is not a foster-mother, or a nanny, guess again. She is a black maid, living in Jackson, Mississippi in the year of 1962. For Aibileen, dealing with scowls and snide remarks from white ladies is perfectly normal and she deals with these situations quite well, her friend Minny, however, has some room for improvement.

Though Minny possesses many talents that are ideal in a maid (good cook, hard working, etc.) she also possesses an attitude that is less than desirable, and has caused her to lose job after job. At last Minny finds a job that right off the bat seems too good to be true: double the pay of her last job, no kids around to mess things up, and cooking for no more than two, but as Minny becomes more acquainted with her employer, she finds that the life of her boss may not be as perfect as it seems.

Eugenia, or Skeeter, Phelan is in her early twenties and more greatly educated than most of the women in that day and age, and nothing could be more unfortunate in the eyes of her mother. As implied Skeeter was blessed by brains and not beauty. With her frizzy, curly hair, boney frame, and height that leaves her towering over most people, she isn’t exactly desirable in the wife department. None of this matters to Skeeter it seems though, as her heart is lost in writing. Though her first job of writing a Miss Myrna column isn’t all that glamorous, it does open more than one squeaky door to success.

In The Help, Kathryn Stockett weaves together individual stories of the lives of these and many other women throughout the book, allowing them each to narrate their own tale. From the first page of the first chapter, we are placed in a time capsule and flashed back to Jackson, Mississippi during the tumultuous era of the sixties. The Help is a book that comes full circle and will leave you laughing out loud one moment, and weeping tears of sadness the next. It will draw to your attention how prejudice tore apart family and friendship, and that sometimes the hard times are the only thing that can reveal who our true friends are. This novel radiates the idea of equality, and exudes the impression that you must either accept what you can’t change, or change what you can’t accept.
The Help ties in humor with something that was once a far more serious issue. It is an easy read for anyone who decides to pull it off the shelf, and it is a novel that I hope will remain on bookshelves for years to come.