I just finished the book 'The Help' and I really loved it!
Anyone else reading this book?
Three ordinary women are about to take one extraordinary step.
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.
I am fascinated as I read the various perspectives of 1962 happenings, and I keep thinking, what a difference nearly 5 decades makes. I can't help but feel grateful for the changes we've seen since that time, mainly because of how different my life would be, had these changes not taken place. In 1962, marriages between blacks and whites were considered void.
Can you imagine?
My marriage would be void, all because BL's skin is a beautiful milk chocolate brown and mine is pasty, casper-ish ivory white. It blows my mind to think that people actually believe(d) they are superior because their skin is lighter, and I am not niave enough to believe no one in the world still feels this way.
It's a shame.
We get plenty of stares when we go out, and they come from all sorts of people....white, black, young, old....but we're 'allowed' to get married and that makes me grateful. Grateful for the changes which have taken place in this world. Grateful for the men and women who fought so hard to integrate our nation. Grateful for a generation who stood up for what is right and broke down barriers. Grateful for parents who taught me that all people are God's precious children, no matter what color they are. Grateful for a husband who showed me that love is [color] blind, and it does not matter what anyone else sees.
Go read this book.
