Medium: Audiobook
Publisher: G.P. Putnam's Sons
Length: 18 hr 7 min
Rating: 1.75/5
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.
Ok folks, this is a first for me. I think the movie was better than the book here. This was a unique reading experience because I have seen the movie around seven to ten times over many, many years, so I knew the plot of the novel really well. It lead to me being annoyed and impatient while reading. A lot of the reasons for the low rating was due to personal enjoyment, but some of it was also due to the writing. While I think the story being told here is important and impactful, the execution was somewhat lacking. I also want to clarify that this is not a book about representation the way it has been toted out to be all these years. This is a story about a white woman struggling with her personal morals and understanding of the divide between living as a white person vs a black person in the American South in the 1960s. Going into this novel expecting anything else will cause disappointment. Let's get into it!
Skeeter, Bless Your Heart
The main crux of my problems with reading this novel fall on Skeeter, her storyline, her POV, and her characterization. I understand that her character is there to portray the ignorance of white children and the slow indoctrination that occurs throughout their lives. I also understand that she has to come from a place of ignorance in order to grow and learn through her time interviewing Aibileen. Where I struggle is the selfishness of all of her initial actions. From basically stealing Aibileen's son's idea for a book, to lying to that New York editor, everything she does is to meet her own aims. Yes, eventually she learns better and starts perusing things for better reasons, but it takes a while to get there. If frustrated me that the character who was toted as the emotionally intelligent one was so emotionally unaware when it came to Aibileen being uncomfortable. Even throughout the rest of the novel, she still puts her goals above everything else. She is written as a self-insert for the author who grew up in a similar environment to Skeeter. Normally I would enjoy that kind of connection, but it becomes disconcerting to me when I think of how self-serving I thought Skeeter was.
It is a difficult line to walk because I know in order to portray growth we have to start somewhere lower, but the final grown place didn't feel as fulfilling as I wanted it to be. I felt like we were still missing the mark because Skeeter got everything she was aiming for while Aibileen and Minny were left with the aftermath. The whole thing just rubbed me the wrong way.
Hurry up and wait
Oh gods the pacing on this book was a mess. So little would happen in so many words for so many chapters and then all the action occurs all at once within a few pages. There was an entire quarter of the book around the the 3/4 mark that could have been cut without really impacting the story at all. This book was extremely long. The details were great until they started to become repetitive and there are entire side story plotlines that did not need to be included and just served to drag the main storyline out unnecessarily. The romance between Stewart and Skeeter is one of those plotlines. It felt thrown in and like the author was only half dedicated to it. Somehow this book of 451 pages felt twice as long as the last book I read that was 478 pages. There were times when reading that I felt like I was dragging myself through the plot. That is never what you want.
I would say that part of this can be contributed to genre, (that last book I read was a fantasy adventure where this one was classic literary fiction) but I have read other books in this genre that did not have this issue.
Basically I was expecting so much more from this book that I got and I came away disappointed and frustrated. I'm glad I finally got around to reading it, but I wouldn't say I will ever read it again. If you have read The Help before, I would love to hear your opinions! What did you think of Skeeter? Does the pacing feel all kinds of off to you? What was your favorite part? Let me know in the comments!
For now,
Keep wondering and stary wandering!
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