One of the things I love about reading, be it fiction or nonfiction, is looking through someone else’s perspective. Kathryn Stocket’s The Help does a wonderful job of portraying multiple sides of the same story through her diverse set of characters.
I started reading the help after a recommendation from my mother. She had seen her cousin reading it and so on and so forth. This book has gotten wonderful advertising through word of mouth. It seems that everyone I talk to has at least heard of it, if not read it. It was published in 2009 and the movie version of the story came out this year. I waited to see the movie until after I had read the book, which took some self-restraint, as I kept hearing great reviews of the movie.
Usually, I prefer reading a book with one perspective. One narrator makes the story clearer and more focused, but I think that the choice of having multiple narrators really helped this book. Because there really were multiple sides that needed to be told of this story, the characters’ voices blended together really well to make a 3-D sculpture rather than a 2-D picture. The open-minded Skeeter asks Aibileen, a colored maid, to tell her about her experiences working for white families. As the story was set in Jackson, Mississippi in 1962, that was a very dangerous thing to propose. Stockett, the author, doesn’t sugar-coat the dangerous aspects of the story. The fear felt at many points throughout the book was almost palpable. She provides examples, both fictional and historical, to show that this serious. The good-natured feelings between characters, in their respective social circles, lighten the mood, so it isn’t a dark book. This is the story about the start of change; it displays how one good mind, with a little help, can actually make a difference. It isn’t a depressing book or a horror story. It is historical, inspirational, and quite exciting.
After reading The Help, which took longer than it should have, but the semester was drawing to a close at school and finals were bearing down, I decided it was time to see the movie.
Of course the book was better than the movie. No avid reader can find more than 4 stories where the movie is better than the book, if the book came first. Books always seem more detailed and have more information in them. Movies can bring a book to life, in some ways, but the book will stick in your head longer because it is more in depth than pictures on a screen. Books can express thoughts and feelings and actions in a way that movies somehow can’t. This movie did bring the characters to life for my eyes, but to my mind, they were already incarnate. I see movies as a tool to more deeply understand a book.
I am a history nut. I love viewing events through other people’s eyes. I loved reading this book and I am glad I bought it so I can come back to read it again and again.
