The Help

I was ready to hate The Help. The way you automatically can’t stand a new Mexican restaurant everyone raves about because it can’t be that good. I mean, come on people, it’s just another taco. But, despite my best cool kid efforts to be above the gushing I kept reading in every magazine and the excitement about the upcoming movie adaptation (I do love Emma Stone!), I ended up falling right in line with the crowd, jumping on the bandwagon, and falling in love.

Kathryn Stockett may be one of my new favorite writers. That may be an overstatement after just one book, but holy hell can this woman create a character. A lot of characters actually. That’s the part that fascinated me the more and more I read and the more and more I got to know these women.

Lots of books use the literary device of shifting character point of view. A few chapters from one, a few from another and so on until sometimes you get so dizzy trying to figure out who is talking your eyes cross.

But very few do it with such distinct voices. I didn’t have to look at the chapter heading to know if I was speaking with young southern white girl Skeeter, or feisty maid Minny or restless  and quiet Aibileen. Each woman has their own cadence, vocabulary, thought process and soul. It takes a skilled craftsman and years of devotion to their art for a writer to create one great character. Stockett creates countless individual living breathing women so well that you can’t help but fall into their world.

And what a world it is. I know the history. Names like Medger Evers and the 4 little girls that died in a church bombing are not unfamiliar markers of our national history. In this context though, they became more real to me than ever before. Through the eyes of actual witnesses living those events like our narrators are, the reality of what the south was like in the 1960’s became a little more focused for me. The lives of these women become more and more real with the infusion of history and what I can only imagine are real accounts of life as a black maid to a white family. These women are writing the book we are reading as we read it. (did I just blow your mind?)

Its layers like this that leave me astonished at The Help. Very rarely do I finish a book and want to read it again. But instead I’ll just jump higher on the bandwagon and gush until I have every other cool kid loving it too.