*This is my first time linking up, so I'm sorry if this one's already been done a lot!*I mentioned it briefly in this post, but I wanted to give a little more detail today.
I had heard so many people talk about how good this book is for a long time before I got a chance to read it. NPR compared the book to To Kill a Mockingbird, which is another book I LOVE. I've been wanting to read it since probably February, but I was really busy with school this past semester, and the only books I had a chance to read were for school [most of them were actually pretty good, but sometimes you just want to read a book of your own choosing, ya know?] so as soon as the semester was over I went and bought this book.
The book is kinda long, but I read it in about a day. I couldn't put it down! I remember telling Lee when I was almost finished that I didn't want it to end. Here's the synopsis from Kathryn Stockett's website:
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.
This is absolutely my new favorite book. I don't normally read books more than once, but I definitely think this is one I'll read over and over. Oh, and the movie's coming out in a few months and I can't wait!
