Read A Book: The Help

Up for  a light read? Like most, I never – well rarely – listen to my mother, she knows everything a little too often. When she handed me The Help, Kathryn Stockett’s first scribblings, I have to admit a dubious frown fell over my face. Fiction, eew, it’s such a dodgy read! One chapter in and I was captured, darn that mother of mine!

Jackson, Mississippi, 1962. Black maids raise white children, but aren’t trusted not to steal the silver. Some lines will never be crossed. The Help is a deeply moving, timeless and universal story about the lines we abide by, and the ones we won’t. It is about how women, whether mothers or daughters, the help or the boss, relate to each other – and that terrible feeling that those who look after your children may understand them, even love them, better than you.

Penguin – Stockett’s publisher – describes The Help as, written in “pitch-perfect voices, Kathryn Stockett creates three extraordinary women whose determination to start a movement of their own forever changes a town, and the way women view one another” and I have to agree, I couldn’t put this book down.

My favorite line is from outside the book, while researching Ms Stockett I sumbled upon this wonderfilled nugget “ But what I am sure about is this: I don’t presume to think that I know what it really felt like to be a black woman in Mississippi, especially the 1960′s.  I don’t think it is something any white woman, on the other end of a black woman’s paycheck, could ever truly understand.  But trying to understand is vital to our humanity” Read the full article »»»»