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The Help | 
 enlarge | Author: Kathryn Stockett
Publisher: Amy Einhorn Books/Putnam
Category: Book
List Price: $24.95
Buy New: $9.50
You Save: $15.45 (62%)
New (89) Used (67) Collectible (4) from $9.00
Rating:  1778 reviews
Sales Rank: 6
Media: Hardcover
Edition: 1
Pages: 464
Number Of Items: 1
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.5
Dimensions (in): 9.1 x 6.3 x 1.8
ISBN: 0399155341
Dewey Decimal Number: 813.6
EAN: 9780399155345
ASIN: 0399155341
Publication Date: February 10, 2009
Availability: Usually ships in 24 hours
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| Features:
| • | ISBN13: 9780399155345 | | • | Condition: NEW | | • | Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark. |
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Product Description
Three ordinary women are about to take one extraordinary step.
Twenty-two-year-old Skeeter has just returned home after graduating from Ole Miss. She may have a degree, but it is 1962, Mississippi, and her mother will not be happy till Skeeter has a ring on her finger. Skeeter would normally find solace with her beloved maid Constantine, the woman who raised her, but Constantine has disappeared and no one will tell Skeeter where she has gone.
Aibileen is a black maid, a wise, regal woman raising her seventeenth white child. Something has shifted inside her after the loss of her own son, who died while his bosses looked the other way. She is devoted to the little girl she looks after, though she knows both their hearts may be broken.
Minny, Aibileenâs best friend, is short, fat, and perhaps the sassiest woman in Mississippi. She can cook like nobodyâs business, but she canât mind her tongue, so sheâs lost yet another job. Minny finally finds a position working for someone too new to town to know her reputation. But her new boss has secrets of her own.
Seemingly as different from one another as can be, these women will nonetheless come together for a clandestine project that will put them all at risk. And why? Because they are suffocating within the lines that define their town and their times. And sometimes lines are made to be crossed.
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 womenâmothers, daughters, caregivers, friendsâview one another. A deeply moving novel filled with poignancy, humor, and hope, The Help is a timeless and universal story about the lines we abide by, and the ones we donât.
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Showing reviews 1-5 of 1778
 The Help March 14, 2010
Carolyn J. Wilkinson
The book is great and it arrived it great condition, too. The price was the lowest I had seen anywhere.
Couldn't put it down!!!! March 14, 2010
T. Huggins (Las Vegas)
I am a mother of two with one on the way....and let's just say, the dishes could wait, laundry could pile up and I had to Tivo my favorite shows! I COULD NOT put this book down. I fell in love with Minny and Aibileen! The fictional lives of these 2 brave women were truly mesmerizng. You will laugh, cry, and even get a little angry at some parts. Katheryn Stockett paints a vivid picture and truly puts you right in the heart of Mississippi during a time when everything was truly black or white, while adding enough color to paint a rainbow! I look forward to her next novel, like a slice of caramel cake! "Which, is something I had never even heard of til reading this amazing book...then had to rush out and buy the ingredients to make my own,lol!"
The Help - 10 star March 14, 2010
Sallie Bailey (Fayetteville NY USA)
I read this book as I read all books - in bed just before I go to sleep. Usually I devote ½ to 1 hour to such reading. This book? Migod - I went `overtime' - and when I turned out the light, thinking about it kept me awake.
I'm 78 - I remember the 60's and the things we read about in the paper - the horrors of violence and the irrationality of separate facilities, the black children approaching the white school - their faces blank as catcalls & insults were screamed by the crowd; the whites with faces so distorted with hate that they look like caricatures. The assassinations, the random cruelty and murders - they were only a quick step away from Hitler's treatment of the Jews.
I'm a damn Yankee - born & bred but I have known these women who populate this book. We all do. Today, in the schools, they're known as the `mean girls' - and when they graduate into home making & motherhood they're known as `queen bees'. In the South of the 50's and 60's, their behavior had darker implications. They drew a curtain of gentility over the ugliness of racial relations.
Some people have criticized the author for using dialect for the black women but not for the white, however - it would have been difficult to determine who was speaking - and after all - dialect marked one of the great divides between whites and blacks at the time.
Despite the serious subject of the book, there's plenty of humor in it and the interactions of the characters- black on black, white on white and mixing the two leads to some interesting and funny situations.
4 and 3/4 Stars for THE HELP March 13, 2010
Lee Peoples (California)
0 out of 2 found this review helpful
THE HELP
Kathryn Stockett
THE HELP, a New York Times bestseller by Kathryn Stockett, is a novel depicting the personal relationship between black maids and the white families, especially the women, who employ them. The story is set in a fictional section of Jackson, Mississippi, from 1962 to 1964. It tells a story of what it was like being a black maid in the Civil Rights era in Jackson, Mississippi, as seen through the eyes of two black maids and one liberal white woman, uniquely three first person narrators.
Three women, seemingly as different from one another as can be, come together for a clandestine project that will put them all at risk and change their lives and the lives of others in a way neither of them has imagined. In the midst of the Civil Rights era, race relations in Mississippi are already dangerous. And Miss Skeeter, a young white woman--twenty-three years old and a recent graduate of Ole Miss, with ambitions of becoming a writer--elicits the help of two black maids.
Upon graduating, Miss Skeeter returns to her family home where she resumes living with her very proper but callous mother and her very kind and gentle father. Her older brother is away in law school at LSU in New Orleans. She is disappointed when she discovers Constantine, the maid who raised her and taught her kindness and self-respect, has been replaced by another black maid. Her mother had fired her after twenty-nine years, but no one will tell her why. "It was a colored thing," her mother responds when asked for an explanation. Neither will anyone tell her how to contact Constantine.
With personal problems of her own and her mother clamoring for her to get married and start a family as have her two friends and former college roommates--but she doesn't even have a boyfriend--she takes a job at the local newspaper, writing a column on housekeeping. But knowing nothing of this subject, she befriends her friend Elizabeth's maid, Aibileen, who helps her write her column. And as always, one thing leads to another. At the suggestion of a woman publisher in New York to write about something she is passionate about, she chooses this subject and embarks upon the writing project that brings her closer to Aibileen and Aibileen's friend Minny.
Minny is a great cook, but she often gets into trouble with her white employers because of her mouth. The only reason she hasn't been fired by Miss Walter, the mother of another of Miss Skeeter's friends, Miss Hilly, she says is because Miss Walter "be deaf as a doe-nob" . . . until Miss Hilly accuses her of theft and fires Minny herself so that she can now place her mother in a home.
Over a period of time they and other black maids meet in secret and write a book entitled simply HELP, which reveals secrets that heretofore have been sacred. But injustices have caused these maids and Miss Skeeter to put themselves at great risk. All names are changed to protect their identities, and the author is Anonymous. Because of the demands for change in race relations in the South, Blacks are suffering even more abuses: hangings, murders, beatings. The men are being fired. Black maids who have been entrusted with the care, nurturing, and raising of white children are being sent to prison on such bogus charges as stealing the silverware.
But true to history, things do change for the better, in some cases at great cost to some of the characters, white and black. Though unique in its style--three first person narrators--this piece of historical fiction is alternately heartwarming, troubling, and at times downright hilarious. The attempt to capture the dialect of the South often challenges the reader's comprehension. In some cases it took me a few pages to decipher her meaning, but soon my eyes and ears adapted to the enunciations/ pronunciations intended. A few incidents were anachronistic, but the author explained her reasons for taking them out of their proper time and placing them in this setting. See the special section after her "Acknowledgements" at the end of the book, entitled "Too Little Too Late" and subtitled "Kathryn Stockett, In Her Own Words." In this section, near the end (page 450), she sums up the feelings that led her to this subject with a quote from "Grady's Gift," the Pulitzer Prize-winning article by Howell Raines:
"There is no trickier subject for a writer from the South than that of affection between a black person and a white one in the unequal world of segregation. For the dishonesty upon which a society is founded makes every emotion suspect, makes it impossible to know whether what flowed between two people was honest feeling or pity or pragmatism."
So, confronted with this quandary, Kathryn Stockett passionately writes her first novel about the troubling times of segregation and integration in the 1960s. It is truly deserving of its bestseller status. I give it 4-3/4 stars because the author left me wondering why she offered no conclusion to the incident involving the naked white man. Surely, Miss Celia's protecting Minny, her black maid, clearly contributed to the theme of mutual love between many of the employees and their employers and the lengths they would go to protect each other; yet I still wanted to know how this situation was resolved.
 The Help March 13, 2010
Richly detailed characters that sweep one into the moment. Very enteraining. I laughed and I cried. Very good read.
Showing reviews 1-5 of 1778
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