Good Read: The Help by Kathryn Stockett

I don't know why it took me so long to read The Help. I have heard from several people over the last year how good it was. Even my Dad read it, and he doesn't read novels. He's more of a non-fiction person. The last novel he read was ten years ago, when he read The Tale of Despereaux with the sixth grade class he was teaching.
I have to say, I really liked it. It didn't take me super long to read it. I was trying to do a bunch of other stuff at the same time, which didn't help me concentrate on reading. But I still finished it in a little over a week, if you count the days I didn't read. Once I really got into it, I couldn't read fast enough. And yet, I wanted to savor it.
I liked the way the book examined relationships between different people. Between white women and their black maids, but also between family members, friends, and strangers. Hilly sickened me. Elizabeth did at times, too. Aibileen made think and sometimes cry. Minny made me laugh. I admired Skeeter's bravery. She was naive in the beginning, but she learned a lot from Aibileen and the other maids. I loved the way that Celia didn't see the lines that everyone else saw. It was interesting to see that not all the stories the maids told were bad. Many of them truly loved the people they worked for. The book made me think a lot about how I treat other people.
I can see how some of the book could be seen as controversial. The fact that it was written by a white woman, who hasn't had to actually deal with any of that black maids in the 1960s had to deal with is one thing. I guess I can't say I can really relate to any of that myself, being a white female. And yet I feel compassion for other people, and hope that I would never been seen treating another person, no matter what race or gender they were, in the way that some of the people in the book were treated.
I actually saw the movie based on the book before I got around to reading the book. I liked them both in different ways. In some ways, I liked the way the movie ended better, because it gave Aibileen strength that the final scenes in the book didn't quite compare to. I will definitely be purchasing the movie when it comes out. And I would even consider buying the book, because it seems like one that I could re-read and pick out new things each time. I like books like that. It makes me feel like they were worth the time it took me to read them.