Reviews

The Help by Kathryn Stockett

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cassischapter's review against another edition

5.0

That was such an heartfelt book that left me constantly thinking about it when I was reading. Honestly makes me proud of the progress we’ve gone through but still upset that things like this still do happen today unfortunately. This is an important book for anyone to read honestly.

feralsouffle's review against another edition

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emotional funny hopeful inspiring fast-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? N/A

5.0

waylintaylin's review against another edition

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5.0

I reallly, really liked this. The movie followed it perfectly, it's amazing.

kawther_ar's review against another edition

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challenging dark emotional informative inspiring sad tense slow-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated

4.75

odin45mp's review against another edition

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3.0

Read as part of my library's Libraryopoly challenge, I pulled this from the Chance box.

This is definitely outside my normal reading tastes. It is well written and fairly respectful to its subject matter, but I feel that it shied away from some of the more brutal excesses of life in the South in the early days of the civil rights movement - some brutality is mentioned off camera, but aside from one character doesn't seem to really touch the characters, and thus this reader. I struggled more than once with the African American dialect having been written by a white woman, that is a personal stumbling block and not an indictment of Stockett's prose.

The story itself feels small "i" impactful in what it is setting out to do, and it does it well. We follow the lives of women in Jackson, MI, 2 black, 1 white, and how they together end up telling the stories of "The Help", the black women who work as maids for the wealthy white women in town. Small town politics, small town gossip, small town sticking-noses-in-other-peoples'-business made me want to give up reading it more than once because I. Don't. Care. And frankly they shouldn't either, it isn't the end of the world like they think it is. But I stuck with it and the story and characters were entertaining and sometimes touching, but this is not something I would normally read and doubt I will ever read again.

librarianinperiwinkle's review against another edition

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5.0

It took me a while to adjust to reading the written dialect/accent of Aibilene and Minny, but once I got going, I fell in love with this book. The characters felt like real people--even Hilly wasn't a one-dimensional villain. I was never entirely sure where the story would lead, not even when I guessed a bit of someone's secrets here or there. I had a hard time putting the book down at the end of my lunch breaks because I wanted to find out what happened next.

I kept wanting to put everyone in a room and make them TALK to each other and see how artificial and arbitrary their differences were, founded on ignorance and prejudice. (I especially wanted Minny to talk to Miss Celia.) But then, I was born more than a decade after this book took place and in an entirely different part of the country. I have very little personal experience with racial prejudice. Or domestic help, for that matter! :) I don't know how I would have handled the cruelty and shameful miscarriages of justice. Would I have been brave enough to risk my life to challenge the hateful status quo? It's really amazing to me just how far we've come in a generation. To have improved that much gives me hope that we will be able to continue the progress into--and beyond--the next generation.

For Reader's Advisors: story and character doorways, with setting also pretty important.