The Help is a book I really had no intention of reading, but bought it for my Mamma 'cause it's "her kind of book" (I hear that all the time and not really sure what that means, is it because it's the cover was yellow? or that it weighed more then a pencil but less then a brick? Or maybe it might have something to do with the content?) Anyways she finished it while she was out here visiting me and told me I should read it too. Since I happened to be out of books at that moment (money too :-) ) I went ahead and flipped it open...12 hours later I hadn't put it down, my poor Hubbin kept waking up begging me to go to sleep, but I just couldn't do it until the book was finished. Here's the thing, I can't really tell you why it was so engrossing. There wasn't any major mystery (a couple of little ones) but nothing over the top suspenseful, it was just a really good story.
A word of warning, it is a tough book to get through on occasion, it does not gloss over anything and it can be heartbreaking at times. The author put down an unrepentant look at Jackson, Mississippi in the early 1960's, in fact I think that is what makes this book while compelling, very difficult and uncomfortable at many points. While the characters and storyline are technically works of the authors imagination, the feel, attitude and accepted "way things are" are not fiction at all, they are very very real. I think we sometimes don't want to believe that anywhere could be that discriminatory in recent history, that we want it all to stay in the distant past, before we "knew better", but this book shows us our grandparents, parents, even some of us in a not so accepting light. The worst part of it for me while reading, is how EVERYBODY just accepted the fact that it had always been like that, and would probably always be like that, the blacks accepted it in their own way just as much as the whites did.
Now that I have depressed everyone, this book does offer several bright and shining ray's of hope. Mostly in the form of a few women willing to believe that everybody should have a chance to be seen as human. The story is basically a white southern girl from Jackson, returns home from college determined to become a writer. She eventually settles on the idea to write an anonymous book based on true stories from the hired help. Through out the process she and the women she interacts with learn what the real relationship between the hired help and the families they work for, between blacks and whites, between economic classes, between men and women, parents and children and between friends both old and new is. There are fights about the old ways of doing things, struggles against ingrained thought process, trying to keep the balance between what you believe and the loyalty you owe others. The more I read it, the more it became about more then just the racial differences in the old south and really about a town stuck in the past trying desperately to catch up to the "new world" while retaining it's identity. 
Ok so this post is getting long and disjointed so I will stop here and let you read it for yourself. I know I did not put in a lot of plot details, but that is because I cannot do it justice here in a couple of pages. There are always going to be some inaccuracies, and you will never be able to focus on all the injustices and stereotyping in a single story, but I think the author did her best to get out a good story. Also after you have finished reading the book, go watch the movie, it was well done and between the two you get a very full and rich picture of the whole story...um and I can probably never eat chocolate cream pie again :-)What did you think of the book? Did you think it brought up some good points, or was it to preachy. What message did you think the author was trying to get across? Can you every look at a chocolate cream pie the same way after reading this book?
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