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Title: The Help
Author: KATHRYN STOCKETT
Length: 451 pages
Format: Hardcover
Genre: Fiction; Historical
Rating: ✮✮

Jackson, Mississippi in the 1960s—I imagine that sentence conjures up images of segregation, violent civil disorder, and the crushing social disparity among rich southerners, poor whites, and African-Americans forced into menial labour. With a backdrop as turbulent and unpredictable as this, one might expect The Help would rattle our collective image of the period while humanizing the politics of that era. One question boils beneath the surface of the text: how does a woman reconcile her role as a domestic worker and her reality as a second-class citizen, one who is even barred from using the same washroom as the family employing her?

With rampant hype at its heels and a score of heavy topics glossed over in the text, The Help managed to miss the mark for me—the massive build-up behind the book and a few glaring issues throughout the work ensured a lack lustre response from this kid right here.


Aibileen Clark has worked as a domestic labourer since her teens, foregoing higher education opportunities and sacrificing her writing talent to support her family. She gravitates toward white families with young children and has a definite maternal streak to her; however, she never holds these positions for long. In each case, Aibileen has loved and cared for children who end up learning the same racial prejudices as their parents, and she cannot bear to watch the transformation occur. In the aftermath of her only son's death, Aibileen takes on a job with the Leefolt family and minds their toddler, Mae Mobley, a young girl who is nothing more than a burden to her flighty, superficial mother.

Aibileen's closest friend, Minny Jackson, has made a name for herself through her confrontational attitude and a Terrible Awful deed she committed against Jackson's Junior League President, Hilly Holbrook. Hilly is a calculating, vindictive woman and she's also the leader of the community—to protect her character, Hilly convinces the other women of Jackson to bar Minny from employment. In the end, Minny takes on a domestic position with Celia Foote, a woman who comes from a definite "white trash" background. Since the proper women of the town want nothing to do with Celia, Minny's job is safe for the time being, so long as Mr. Foote knows nothing of her existence.

At the same time, Eugenia "Skeeter" Phelan returns to Jackson after completing her college degree. Skeeter aspires to write full time while her mother aims to marry her daughter off as soon as a proper gent can be found. Skeeter is not a proper Southern girl at all—she wants a career instead of a marriage, she wears pants whenever possible, and she senses the innate injustice of her town's segregation. She fails to get a job with a prominent New York publishing house, but the senior editor Elaine Stein takes an interest in Skeeter and encourages the young girl to find a volatile issue to write about.

After taking a job as the "Miss Myrna" columnist with the Jackson Journal, Skeeter calls on Aibileen (her friend's maid) to help answer the cleaning and home care questions—in the ensuing meetings, Skeeter learns of Aibileen's son and the book he'd been writing when he died. Treelore wanted to profile the experiences of black men and women working in the South and give voice to the suffering they endured for the sake of a living wage. Skeeter runs with the idea and sets out to write a first-person account of what it's like for the maids of Jackson to live and work among the white families of the area. Of course, the task is a dangerous one, and Aibileen and Minny have their work cut out for them while attempting to convince other women to dedicate their stories to the cause…