Published by Penguin Audio, Berkley Publishing Group on January 3rd 2011
Genres: Literary Fiction
Pages: 522
Format: Audiobook
ISBN: 0425232204
ASIN: B001SIHRUY
Goodreads
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.
In pitch-perfect voices, Kathryn Stockett creates three extraordinary women whose determination to start a movement of their own forever changes a town, and the way women—mothers, daughters, caregivers, friends—view one another. A deeply moving novel filled with poignancy, humor, and hope, The Help is a timeless and universal story about the lines we abide by, and the ones we don’t.
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Having bragged over the last few weeks about my incredible run of great narrators, I thought it was about time to take on The Help by Kathryn Stockett, a book that has not one, but four narrators; Jenna Lamia as Eugenia “Skeeter” Phelan, Octavia Spencer as Minny, Bahni Turpin as Aibileen, and Cassandra Campbell as the third person narrator of a chapter entitled The Benefit. When I first started listening to audiobooks on a regular basis, The Help was one of my first books. There really isn’t any need to get into a review of the book’s content. It was critically acclaimed both as a book and a movie and won the Earphones Award and Audie Fiction and Distinguished Achievement in Production Awards for the year 2010 for the audiobook. Those of you who saw the movie will remember that Octavia Spencer won an Oscar for her performance as Minny . . . the same role she performed in the audiobook.
In doing research for my review, I discovered that just as beauty is in the eye of the beholder, the relative merits of a narrator are in the ears of the listener. I found that listeners are influenced by everything from previous experiences with the narrator to their own perceptions of what a character should sound like. I found that readers and listeners don’t always appreciate or understand the author’s intent when a bit of artistic license is taken. I also found support for my opinion that some books just naturally lend themselves to being performed audibly and are actually better being heard than read: The Help is one of those books. I would not want to be an author writing a book attempting to convey a dialect. Each of you has probably read at least one book like this. Some authors do it well; others, not so much. I’m not sure I could have gotten through The Help if I had tried to read the book first, but the audio version is perfect!
The performers who do the narration – follow the links above to learn more about them – have a wealth of experience and they perform the dialects authentically, leaving listeners with a clear impression of a troubling time in our history. In my opinion, whoever is responsible for choosing this combination of women showed remarkable insight into the author’s characters and her story. If you are one of the few people in the world who has neither seen the movie nor read the book, I highly recommend you remedy this oversight and choose the audiobook. I give it 5 stars for the production and the cast!
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