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, Aibileen's best friend, is short, fat, and perhaps the sassiest woman in Mississippi. She can cook like nobody's business, but she can't mind her tongue, so she's 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."
I have very mixed feelings about this book. On one hand I think that the subject matter was handed with delicacy. The writing was subtle and at times very beautiful. I think Aibileen's chapters where beautiful and full of soul. A perfect cocktail of love and melancholy. She reminded me of maids I knew. You get a good idea of the atmosphere of the time and place, I really felt transported to Mississippi.
I also thoroughly enjoyed the character of Minny, she was sassy and more vocal in her anger. I think she and Aibileen contrasted each other well with their different attitudes.
However, I was uncomfortable with the tone of the book; I felt that the author played to very stereotypical themes, and gave the characters (especially the African American ones) very obvious voices and structure in terms constructing their mental character. I understand that the author wrote much of this as a result of her experiences growing up in the south in the 1960's, and that it may seem authentic to her, and that she was even trying to be respectful of the people and the time; but, ultimately, I thought that it was written from a very narrow, idealised, almost childish perspective of race relations without a true appreciation of the humanity and soul of the characters. It had a nostalgic, feel good vibe that didn't sit well with me.
As a white South African that grew up with maids my experience with the "help" was obviously very different to that of an American. However I am unsure that this book represented either side totally accurately. Stockett brushed over the true deep anger that I am sure that the Maids dealt with and shrunk it to the feeling of annoyance of picking up towels.
The structure of the book also focused more on the white characters and their struggles in their life and dealing with the first realisation that they might be in a racist world. So the ultimate theme & message (i.e. "why, we're all the same - there's no difference between us after all!") only reinforced my feeling that this is written from someone who has a very undeveloped or underdeveloped concept of race and race relations in the United States.
I applaud her effort and think it would be a great introduction to race relations in the South for someone new to the topic and might be a little hesitant to start. But it is very surface level without any real deep dive into the horrors inflicted during this period of time or the psyche of the people living on the other side of the train line.
Age Rating 13+. Touches on some serious subjects such as domestic abuse but nothing very inappropriate.
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