The Help was a thoroughly enjoyable read. The story is inspiring and moving and sets a scene many people would rather forget. As much as I enjoyed the story, though, it did not speak to me in ways it did to other friends. Perhaps that involves my background of growing up as a minority, or perhaps it’s my recent time spent visiting so many places key to the civil rights movement where I have spent the needed quiet time reflecting and feeling and emoting. But I think too that some of this had to do with the voice of one character, Skeeter, whose story was written with the wisdom that the author surely has gained in her 40+ years, but the character was supposed to be in her early 20s. I did not buy it. Not that some women don’t become amazing women of in their own right at a young age, but nothing was developed in Skeeter’s background and character enough to show how she had gotten to this place of revelation. And so, perhaps instead my hesitation with the story is knowing the own struggle I went through in finding myself and separating from prejudicial attitudes and closed mindedness. True, maybe it is not fair to transfer all of that onto Skeeter, but to me, literature is about what happens in the reader. And to this reader, I felt cheated out of more of Skeeter’s journey. The journey, after all, is what it’s all about.
Musings on Films, Books, and Other Media Forms
