The Help

The Help, a fictional account of three women's experiences with racism, prejudice, and discrimination in the south in the early 1960s, is a beautifully written novel by Kathryn Stockett. The story is narrated by three women: Aibileen and Minny, both black domestic maids to white families, and Skeeter, a recent graduate from Ole Miss and an aspiring journalist. Given the race relations in Jackson, Mississippi, where Skeeter lives, Skeeter has an idea to write a book from the help's perspective. Specifically, she wants to interview local black maids and incorporate their stories about working for white families into a book. While it takes some convincing from Skeeter and the occurrence of other events to help precipitate involvement in the project, a few maids secretly agree to tell Skeeter about their lives. Stockett masterfully weaves the stories of the three narrators together and intertwines each maid's story into a cohesive read.

I like this book. A lot. The Help is one of those novels that you just can't put down. I like it, first, because it's well-written, creative, and suspenseful. Second, I'm partial to the time period in which the book takes place. Race relations in the post-reconstruction era in the United States and the civil rights movement were always topics that held my interest in history class. To this day, I find this time period in our country's history ridiculously fascinating. Not because the issues surrounding race relations are fun and heartwarming, but because it boggles my mind how we could treat a whole population of people with such cruelty. How could we rationalize the Jim Crow laws? How could we think separate was equal? How could we justify assaulting people for the color of their skin? Torturing them? Killing them? It's so gross to me. And then we have people like Martin Luther King, Jr. who stood up to our country's bullshit.  What an amazing, inspirational, and courageous person Mr. King was. So you see, this book just really had me at hello.

I saw the movie, too. As with every movie based on a novel that I can think of (except The Notebook), in my opinion, the novel is better. That's not to say that the movie isn't good or worth seeing. I enjoyed the movie, but I know I would have enjoyed it more if I hadn't read the book first. I don't even know if I can articulate why. I like the cast, and I think the acting was pretty good. The movie was mostly true to the novel. There were differences in the way certain parts played out, though. You'll have to read the book and see the movie to know what I'm talking about, but in the end I think it was the omission of the little things that felt off to me. It's like when Pepsi stopped using sugar and started using corn syrup. It's still Pepsi, and it tastes like Pepsi, but it's just not the same.