Sorry I neglected this feature for the last month, but it doesn’t mean I haven’t been reading. I have and I’ve even ventured off my own beaten path of Urban Fantasy and Paranormal Romance. This weeks feature:
The Help
by Kathryn Stockett
Literary Fiction
From the Barnes and Noble website:
“Be prepared to meet three unforgettable women:
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.
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 women-mothers, daughters, caregivers, friends-view 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 don’t.”
Over Memorial Day weekend, my friend Angie recommended The Help to another of my friends and raved, “From the first paragraph I was hooked. You have to get this.”
So, when getting ready for my long road trip up to Wisconsin, I downloaded The Help onto my Ipod. I listened to this book all the way there and listened all the way back until every last word was uttered. It was fantastic and I can’t recommend it enough. Run down walk to your retailer of choice. Angie was right. I was hooked from the first paragraph.
