The Help

I'll get to the point: This book is the best, most powerful book I've read in a long time.

What is even more impressive is the fact that this is the first book from the author, Kathryn Stockett.

I'm a little late in reading this; I think the book came out early in 2009 and has been on the New York Times Bestseller List for quite a while. You might already know what it is about.

If you don't, here's an overview. Set in the early 1960s in Mississippi, The Help is about two "black domestics" who team up with--and develop a friendship with--a young, white, fresh-from-college aspiring female writer who wants to tell their stories of what it is like to work for white families in a very racially divided community. The book is relayed from multiple viewpoints, and it is at times touching, at times horrifying, at times hilarious...but most of all, it feels authentic. (This is why I never liked the show Dawson's Creek. High schoolers do not talk like that, people. But Friday Night Lights? That show is dead on.)

As for this authenticity...in the afterword by the author, she explains her own affection for the black woman who helped raised her. Stockett is honest in claiming that she can never truly know what it is like to be on the other side of things, but she tries to understand.

I absolutely love Southern literature. In my first year of college, I was fortunate to have one of the best English teachers I ever had--she reminded me a little of Julia Sugarbaker on Designing Women--and she talked so enthusiastically about authors like Eudora Welty, William Faulkner, Flannery O'Connor, and Bobbie Ann Mason that I picked up every book she recommended and read it fervently from cover to cover. The Help reminded me why I love the stories of the South.