In case you didn't noticed, this blog has been DEAD for half a year now. More than half a year, in fact. Unless I update it with chapters of my pathology or anatomy textbooks T___T anyway summer break is a good time to catch up with reading! I must have bought this book ages ago and totally forgot about it. anyway.
The "help" in this title refers to African-american maids working for white people in the 1960s. Where they cannot dine with the whites, cannot go to the same school as the whites, cannot work in places where whites work. The story tells mainly about 3 women, two of them maids and one a white, who want to prove a point to the world, that black and white is just a colour and doesn't make any difference to how one should be treated.
Aibileen is a maid who has taken care of seventeen children throughout her career, and she has always had a good record with her manners and attitude. She recalls how she got fired from her first job:
I come home that morning, after I been fired, and stood outside my house with my new work shoes on. The shoes my mama paid a month's worth a light bill for. I guess that's when I understood what shame was and the colour of it too. Shame ain't black, like dirt, like I always thought it was. Shame be the colour of the new white uniform your mother ironed all night to pay for, white without a smudge or a speck a work-dirt on it.I think it's scary to think that the colour of shame is the colour of innocence. She was being accused of stealing silverware from the house and thus fired. How can you be ashamed of something you didn't even do? That is the fate that most maids face when they have ignorant and proud white bosses.
The second lady is also a maid, Minny, who can barely keep her mouth shut and even though she's a great cook, she often finds herself jobless once she says something that angers the boss.
Skeeter Phelan, however, is a college graduate who aspires to be a writer. She goes for bridge with her fellow ladies but finds them annoying when they mistreat their maids. She wants to make it big, to New York City, but fails to find material interesting enough to catch the attention of the editor, until she submits her proposal to write about black maids working for the whites.
The editor initially scoffs at the idea, wondering how are the maids going to open up to a white and tell her how it feels like working for Skeeter's friends and such. But with a turn of events, the maids felt that their stories needed to be heard, and they knew the price that they were going to pay.
It's a sad story about how differences set people apart, and when the majority of the population finds nothing wrong with that, people who opposes it are persecuted. I guess the hardest thing they are fighting here is mentality. But this is seriously a good read!! The characters are well developed, with characters so easy to hate and to love.
LOVE THIS BOOK!!! <3
I'd personally give 4.9/5.0
