Abandoned by Booklikes

Told from three POV's, this book focuses on two black maids living in Mississippi during the 1960s and a young white woman.

The first POV is an older black woman named Aibileen who is still mourning the son she lost a few years back. Aibileen is excellent with young children, but finds herself moving on quicker after she finds herself getting attached to her young charges.

The second POV is by a younger black maid named Minnie. Minnie is a great cook, but finds it hard to hold onto a job because she always "backtalks" her bosses.

The third and final POV is by a young white woman named Skeeter. Skeeter is home from college and due to not being pretty enough or short enough can't seem to catch a beau to satisfy her family. After watching what is being done in her small town with regards to how white women treat "The Help" she decides she is going to write a book about these women and approaches Aibileen.

So this book would have been a five star read for me if only we had actually focused on The Help in this book and the fact that I am a little bit tired of the sassy fat black woman trope that was pushed on me as a reader while reading. It's super exhausting when this character always seems to show up in books like this, it drives me nuts. And honestly I am wondering if I am being a bit too generous with the stars or what. Because though I did enjoy it while reading it, I am realizing after the fact why I had problems with certain parts of the book as written.

I thought the character of Aibileen was perfect. Maybe because I saw the movie and I love all things Viola Davis, but as soon as Aibileen "spoke" she was in my head the whole way.

You understand Aibileen's reluctance to even become involved with Skeeter's crusade at first. During that time in the U.S. you could be killed by the KKK for even running around talking about how blacks and whites should be equal. So it made sense to me why she and the other 'help' were scared to even get involved with it at all. I definitely liked Aibileen's turning point after dealing with Miss Hilly Holbrook (the most cartoon villain character ever) and having Aibileen's boss push for a separate toilet that Aibileen had to use.

Minnie's character I loved a lot. I honestly did not need to have chapter headers with her or Aibileen's name up front because these two women sound nothing a lot. While Aibileen is cautious and smart enough to not do anything to draw attention to herself. Minnie cannot help being who she is and talking back to people even though she knows that can get her fired or killed.

And that is the one part that did not ring true for Minnie's character. She has several kids in the book and a husband that abuses her. I did not see how this woman who definitely needed a job would ever as she said in her own words "backtalk" someone she worked for. When she's pushed to the breaking point by Miss Hilly she does something that she regrets, but we as readers don't find out about it til almost the very end of the book.

The character of Skeeter I am going to say again was super unnecessary. I wish she had been a secondary character that characters like Aibileen and Minnie met and yes she could have been the person to pull all of the stories together. I just wish we had focused more on 'The Help' and think that if Kathryn Stockett had focused on the character of Yule Mae (she worked for Miss Hilly) then that would have given us an interesting perspective of that character (Hilly). I say that because at the end Miss Hilly was like a cartoon villain and was just a joke. She got her just desserts in the book, but I definitely like how the movie version had her getting sent off by Skeeter's mother.

And that is why I had some trouble with the points of views. We get to see how Aibileen feels about her employer Elizabeth Leefolt, how Minnie liked and respected Mrs. Walters and how she came to care (in her way) for her new boss, Celia Foote.

We don't get a chance to see how Skeeter comes to view anyone really. I mean she realizes that her love interest in the book was not worth her time, and she finds out about what occurred with her family's former maid. However, none of these things really seemed to change Skeeter. I felt she was the same person throughout the book.

I am going to say that Kathryn Stockett's dialect for Aibileen and Minnie did not take me out of the book at all. That is because I just got done reading Gone With the Wind and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. If you want to pull your hair out about writing in the vernacular and stereotypes for black speakers look no further after you read those two little gems. I will say though even without those books to compare to I still would not have had a problem with that though. I think because Aibileen and Minnie talk how my grandparents generations "speaks'. So for me it was not jarring to read them speaking like this at all. I would have had more of a problem if everyone was speaking picture perfect English. Not every black person spoke like Dr. Martin Luther King back then, and even today you do not have every person who is black that sounds like each other.

I think the flow was great though I will say that I did find myself less interested in all of Skeeter's passages. I wanted to focus on Aibileen and Minnie.

The setting of Jackson makes sense for this book since there was a lot going on historically at that point in time. You had the murder of Medgar Evers that happened in Jackson, you had Dr. King's march on Washington, D.C. and his "I Have A Dream" speech. Kathryn Stockett includes this in this book, however I don't think she manages to show the weight these and other events had on the black community as a whole.

And sometimes she says things and I don't think she gets how she comes across such as when she mentions though all of the maids can now sit wherever, they all sit on the back of the bus because they like the companionship of talking. I cringed. It was a totally tone deaf moment. I won't bore you all with this (well too much) but bus segregation was ruled unconstitutional by the Supreme Court in 1956. And that boycott caused a lot of arrests, beatings, and international media attention. So no, I don't see how only a couple of years after all of that you would have blacks saying well hey let's sit in the back, you know, for companionship.

The ending fell a bit flat for me too (wow I am realizing this is really a 3.5 star book) and I felt that there was no real ending. I think we are supposed to be cheered by one character breaking free from Jackson. I myself just kind of rolled my eyes.

So that said I found this to honestly be a three and a half star book. I really did enjoy it, but I am realizing that there are a lot more issues that I initially noticed. I blame it on The Readathon (not in a bad way) it just happens when you start one book after another. You don't give yourself time to digest the book.