On My Night Table


THE HELP BY KATHRYN STOCKETT

This book pulled me in and I loved the three narrators even while I felt like it was a little calculated on the author’s part to be written for an Oprah audience. This is the story of a Skeeter a young white woman who has just returned from University to her Jackson, Mississippi home during the early 60‘s who wants to be a writer. She decides to try and anonymously tell the stories of the African American women who serve as maids (and so much more) to hers and so many of her contemporaries’ families. It is also the story of MInny and Aiblileen, two of the maids who tell Skeeter their stories.

On the personal side, the fact that this kind of thing was occurring just a few years before I was born is shocking. We all know about the Civil Rights Movement but by the time I can remember, it had been dealt with, or it sure seemed like it. I grew up with Sesame Street, Electric Company, Good Times and all sorts of entertainment with people of colour in it.  I also grew up bi-racial in Canada in an Urban setting, but it seems almost impossible that less than 10 years before I was born, this was all going down. 

I found much of the injustice doled out to be very frustrating and couldn’t wait for the dealers of said injustice to get their comeuppance.  The end of this book didn’t really deliver on that end, but life is never so simple, either.  While the ending was satisfying in some aspects, there was a character I would have liked to see humiliated or brought down and that never really happened in a big enough way. Perhaps, the movie will switch this up as movies tend to do.

Kathryn Stockett has written a book that invites conversation, debate and discussion. She is a white woman writing, at times, in a first-person voice of a black woman in the 60’s.  I feel like she did a good job capturing all three of her narrators’ voices and the pacing and plotting of the book was both interesting and kept me turning the pages. I look forward to whatever Stockett next produces.