Kathryn Stockett's The Help

I liked Kathryn Stockett's The Help, but I wanted to love it. I wanted it to creep into my bones like so many other works about Southern women and their problematic relationships. I wanted it to be risky and a little more painful than it actually was. I wanted a villain that was sympathetic and revealing, and protagonists whose lives were more developed. I wanted the book to have heavy consequences for me.

It didn’t do those things. It was engrossing; I read it in about 6 hours, deeply drawn in to the story and invested in the characters. My heart pounded at the end and I ached for the villain to get a much needed comeuppance despite knowing that good novelists never let the villain get overtly punished. The book understands its world, perhaps a little too well – it sees the ways that humans turn on each other and revile each other. It witnesses the ways that people will search for anything that degrades that which they fear and will stop at nothing to control their own lives and the destinies of others. We see a lot of this in the character of Hilly, who is, SPOILER, the villain. Hilly is manipulative; she takes great pleasure in inflicting Skeeter’s punishment, and it is apparent from the start that Hilly is looking for someone to punish or scapegoat. She reveals her foul plans in front of those who will be most harmed, daring them to speak against her, and she fantastically overestimates her own power and charm. Hilly is made to be hated, and that’s part of the problem.