The Help by Kathryn Stockett

Just finished readying The Help by Kathryn Stockett, and I just wanted to say I loved it. Beautifully written. Wonderfully complex characters. A satisfying plot that kept me turning pages. 

The book is about the relations between white middleclass women in the south during 1960’s segregation and the black women who work for them. The story for me comes down to a quote from the book: “Wasn’t that the point of the book? For women to realize, We are just two people. Not that much separates us. Not nearly as much as I’d thought.”

In the postscript, Stockett added a quote from Howell Raines’s Pulitzer Prize-winning article, Grady’s Gift:

There is no trickier subject for a writer from the south than that of affection between a black person and a white one in the unequal world of segregation. For the dishonesty upon which a society is founded makes every emotion suspect, makes it impossible to know whether what flowed between two people was honest feeling or pity or pragmatism.

That quote kind of blew me away, because he describes such a large and important topic in such a beautifully succinct way.