Disponible:*
Biblioteca | Tipo de material | Signatura | Estado |
---|---|---|---|
Búsqueda… Englewood | Audiobooks | FIC STO CD | Búsqueda… Desconocido |
Encuadernado con estos títulos
En pedido
Resumen
Resumen
Be prepared to meet three unforgettable women.
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.
Reseñas (5)
Reseña de Publisher's Weekly
Four peerless actors render an array of sharply defined black and white characters in the nascent years of the civil rights movement. They each handle a variety of Southern accents with aplomb and draw out the daily humiliation and pain the maids are subject to, as well as their abiding affection for their white charges. The actors handle the narration and dialogue so well that no character is ever stereotyped, the humor is always delightful, and the listener is led through the multilayered stories of maids and mistresses. The novel is a superb intertwining of personal and political history in Jackson, Miss., in the early 1960s, but this reading gives it a deeper and fuller power. A Putnam hardcover (Reviews, Dec. 1). (Feb.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Reseña de Booklist
Jackson, Mississippi, in the early 1960s is a city of tradition. Silver is used at bridge-club luncheons, pieces polished to perfection by black maids who yes, ma'am, and no, ma'am, to the young white ladies who order the days. This is the world Eugenia Skeeter Phelan enters when she graduates from Ole Miss and returns to the family plantation, but it is a world that, to her, seems ripe for change. As she observes her friend Elizabeth rudely interact with Aibileen, the gentle black woman who is practically raising Elizabeth's two-year-old daughter, Mae Mobley, Skeeter latches ontothe idea of writing the story of such fraught domestic relations from the help's point of view. With the reluctant assistance of Aibileen's feisty friend, Minny, Skeeter manages to interview a dozen of the city's maids, and the book, when it is finally published, rocks Jackson's world in unimaginable ways. With pitch-perfect tone and an unerring facility for character and setting, Stockett's richly accomplished debut novel inventively explores the unspoken ways in which the nascent civil rights and feminist movements threatened the southern status quo. Look for the forthcoming movie to generate keen interest in Stockett's luminous portrait of friendship, loyalty, courage, and redemption.--Haggas, Carol Copyright 2010 Booklist
Guardian Review
It's not often you get an Oscar-winner reading an audiobook, but even without Octavia Spencer, who bagged Best Supporting Actress this year for her part in the film of Stockett's bestseller, this would still be one of the most enthralling novels I've ever heard. I almost didn't bother with it, having briefly sampled the movie on a long-haul flight recently. Good books rarely turn into good films. With four narrators, this is more like a radio play, which must surely be an advantage in a story where not just what people say, but the accent and the tone in which they say it, is all-important. It's set in Jackson, Mississippi, in 1962, when Ku Klux Klan lynchings were shrugged off by the police (exclusively white, of course - remember what happened to Sidney Poitier in In the Heat of the Night, when he was sent from New York to help the local cops investigate a Bible Belt murder?). The book's title refers to the black domestic servants or "maids", as their genteel white employers call them. While their submissive, long-suffering, uncomplaining house slaves clean, cook, scrub, wait on and look after the children, their mistresses play bridge and work out whose turn it is to host the next baseball match party where their husbands, all alumni of Ole Mississippi University, will gather round the wooden television set in the parlour to cheer on their team, the Ole Miss Rebels. They know nothing about the harsh living conditions of their black servants. They support Miss Hillie's campaign to make outside lavatories for black maids obligatory in white homes. Getting them to use the guest bathroom is not enough - coloured people carry infectious urinary diseases. And when Miss Eugenia Phelon, worth 25,000 cotton dollars but still unmarried at 23 and nicknamed Skeeter because she looks like a mosquito, asks her mother why she has to sit with two of her help shucking oysters on the verandah, Mrs Phelon whispers: "you cannot leave a negro and a negra together unchaperoned. It's not their fault, they just can't help it." But Skeeter has initiative. She writes to a New York publisher about her ambitions to be a journalist and is tersely advised that she should first find a subject she feels passionately about. So she does. The Phelons' help, Constantine, who has been with the family for 30 years, suddenly leaves. Why? No one will say, so Skeeter asks Aibileen, her friend's maid, not just about her beloved substitute mother but about what it's like to work for white people. The New York editor is impressed. Martin Luther King has called for a massive anti-segregation march on Washington for the following August. If Skeeter could produce a controversial book by then . . . Like Skeeter, Stockett has found her subject - a great story, beautifully written and brilliantly told. - Sue Arnold It's not often you get an Oscar-winner reading an audiobook, but even without Octavia Spencer, who bagged Best Supporting Actress this year for her part in the film of Stockett's bestseller, this would still be one of the most enthralling novels I've ever heard. I almost didn't bother with it, having briefly sampled the movie on a long-haul flight recently. Good books rarely turn into good films. With four narrators, this is more like a radio play, which must surely be an advantage in a story where not just what people say, but the accent and the tone in which they say it, is all-important. It's set in Jackson, Mississippi, in 1962, when Ku Klux Klan lynchings were shrugged off by the police (exclusively white, of course - remember what happened to Sidney Poitier in In the Heat of the Night, when he was sent from New York to help the local cops investigate a Bible Belt murder?). - Sue Arnold.
Kirkus Review
The relationships between white middle-class women and their black maids in Jackson, Miss., circa 1962, reflect larger issues of racial upheaval in Mississippi-native Stockett's ambitious first novel. Still unmarried, to her mother's dismay, recent Ole Miss graduate Skeeter returns to Jackson longing to be a serious writer. While playing bridge with her friends Hilly and Elizabeth, she asks Elizabeth's seemingly docile maid Aibileen for housekeeping advice to fill the column she's been hired to pen for a local paper. The two women begin what Skeeter considers a semi-friendship, but Aibileen, mourning her son's recent death and devoted to Elizabeth's neglected young daughter, is careful what she shares. Aibileen's good friend Minnie, who works for Hilly's increasingly senile mother, is less adept at playing the subservient game than Aibileen. When Hilly, an aggressively racist social climber, fires and then blackballs her for speaking too freely, Minnie's audacious act of vengeance almost destroys her livelihood. Unlike oblivious Elizabeth and vicious Hilly, Skeeter is at the verge of enlightenment. Encouraged by a New York editor, she decides to write a book about the experience of black maids and enlists Aibileen's help. For Skeeter the book is primarily a chance to prove herself as a writer. The stakes are much higher for the black women who put their lives on the line by telling their true stories. Although the expos is published anonymously, the town's social fabric is permanently torn. Stockett uses telling details to capture the era and does not shy from showing Skeeter's dangerous navet. Skeeter's narration is alive with complexityher loyalty to her traditional Southern mother remains even after she learns why the beloved black maid who raised her has disappeared. In contrast, Stockett never truly gets inside Aibileen and Minnie's heads (a risk the author acknowledges in her postscript). The scenes written in their voices verge on patronizing. This genuine page-turner offers a whiff of white liberal self-congratulation that won't hurt its appeal and probably spells big success. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Library Journal Review
In 1960s Jackson, MS, three very different women are brought together by a project that attempts to tell the stories of black women in service. Brilliantly narrated by Jenna Lamia, Bahni Turpin, Octavia Spencer, and Cassandra Campbell. (c) Copyright 2014. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.