Coming Up For Air

I haven't had much time to come up for air in the past week but I'm happy to report that all is well at The Nook. If you've ever had an idea about doing something - and how exactly that something should look and feel - and it comes to fruition (maybe even a better version of what you'd hoped for or imagined), then you'll understand when I say that's how our first week has been. Whew!

Gary and I love to read (shocking, right?) but haven't had two minutes to devote to anything other than the bookshop for the past seven months or so, now that things have settled a bit, I finally picked up a new book - The Help.

Wow. Loved. It.

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, and 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.

Let's see, we don't really have a rating system, per se, but if we did we'd probably use bookmarks: So, on a scale of one to five, The Help gets 5 bookmarks and a hearty recommendation from this rusty reader.