Author: Kathryn Stockett
Pages: 522
Published: 2011 (Originally published 2010)
Challenges: Chunkster Challenge, Historical Fiction Challenge
Genre: Literary Fiction, Historical Fiction
Edition: Paperback, Movie Tie-in
Source: Personal
Description: 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. (via Goodreads)
Thoughts: This was my second read of the book and I enjoyed it probably more this time around because I was actually paying attention to the small details and noticing things I had missed the first time around. It was also interesting reading the book on the 50th anniversary of Medgar Evers' assassination on June 12 and realizing what the community was feeling at the time of that event. I can say that the book is much more detailed than the movie, but that the movie does utilize a lot of the material in the book through narration. I felt as read on in the book that I was able to feel as though I was actually there.
Bottom line: I know that I said that couldn't see myself re-reading this book, but since it was a book for my bookclub, I was needing to read it again and I think reading it again, I was able to find new things that I had overlooked the first time around I read the book. It might become something that I read on a yearly basis, but knowing my reading habits, it may not. And like I did last time, I am going to recommend this book.
Rating: 4.5/5
Pages for 2013: 7586
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