KT

"It is 1962 in Jacksonville, Mississippi. The times may be changing, but not fast enough for three women, two black and one white, in this town where the lines between the races are so rigid they don’t need to be voiced.

Aibileen has raised 17 white children in her various maid jobs, but recently she lost her own grown son. Her younger friend Minny’s sassy mouth has cost her so many positions that she doesn’t know where to turn --- yet work she must, to support her kids and avoid the dangerous wrath of her abusive husband. Skeeter is 22 and has just returned from college with a journalism degree that she treasures, but not the wedding ring her proper mother had hoped for.

Each of these three ladies get their turn narrating THE HELP, and first-time author Kathryn Stockett has done a marvelous job creating unique, distinct voices for them.

But Skeeter has bigger ambitions and soon approaches Aibileen about a secret project: to write and hopefully publish the stories of the black maids.

This book about a book is a gem. The characters’ insights are hard won and utterly believable, and their voices are often funny and wry. However, even without the timeliness of the racial themes, this novel would touch many hearts. THE HELP is over 400 pages long, but I didn’t want it to end."

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This book is one of my important books because I enjoyed that it was about a different topic than the other books a teenager would read. I liked the controversy between Skeeter and her friends, and how she was willing to go against the morals of the people around her just to prove a point. Aibileen and Minny are my two favorite characters because they are such strong women, who even though they have rules and regulations to how to live their lives, they still never break down and fully conform. Meanwhile the book follows mini relationships between the characters: like the love Mae Mobley has for Aibileen and vice versa and how Aibileen teaches her to not be like her mother, the growing relationship between Stuart and Skeeter which has its ups and downs when meeting problems that they cannot seem to solve and stay together through, and lastly the budding friendship with Minny and Miss Celia as they give and take within figuring out how to act around each other. The book shows each and every character growing and changing and has many mini stories throughout it that end up all coming together, which is what I really enjoyed.

I love the change in narration by chapter, and the dialect. The perspective was like nothing I've ever read before. LOVE IT!

"Veronica "Ronnie" Miller is just shy of her 18th birthday, and that gap allows her mother to insist that she and her little brother, Jonah, spend the summer with the father who left them years earlier. When Ronnie arrives at her father's tiny beach house in North Carolina, she's in a funk, sure that she's about to waste an entire summer by staying with the parent she hasn't spoken to since he left.

While the story revolves around Ronnie, several characters relate their own tales. Steve, Ronnie's father, is eagerly and nervously anticipating the arrival of his children. When Ronnie arrives at her father's, she immediately takes off, heading for a beachside festival, where Will, a handsome volleyball player, runs into her, spilling soda all over her blouse.

Relations between Ronnie and her father continue to be uncomfortable. While Steve works hard to be accommodating and caring (even building a temporary wall to hide his piano when Ronnie tells him she hates looking at it), Ronnie cannot bring herself to forgive him for abandoning her and her brother. Jonas is much more easily won over, but Ronnie thaws a bit when she discovers something truly amazing on the beach. Her father shares her awe, and her discovery brings Will into her life again.

As the characters' lives braid together, secrets are uncovered. While a few of the subplots in Nicholas Sparks’s latest novel follow predictable paths, readers are likely to identify with the hopes and dreams of Ronnie and her father as they find their way to reconciliation and redemption. The North Carolina beach is a vibrant backdrop to this story of love between romantic partners and between family members --- a tale that very effectively stirs the emotions."

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This is one of my important books because it is probably my favorite book of all time. It is one of the best love story books I have ever read because it is not just about the love story. I love how Will is able to peel away Ronnie's attitude and harder outer shell to get to the real, sweet, caring person she is, and I love how by him doing that it shows true love and how they fit well together as a couple. But while Ronnie and Will are forming their relationship Ronnie and her father are trying to repair theirs, and while it is sad that it took until Steve was sick and in the hospital for them to truly reconnect it made me happy that they did fix their father/daughter relationship and go back to enjoying being around each other and playing the piano together. My favorite thing of all is that throughout the whole book Ronnie and her younger brother Jonah are always there for each other and looking out for one another, even when they fight they still love each other. And even though in the end Steve dies I was very happy that Ronnie and Will came back to each other and that everyone was able to be content with their lives.

= checked by Mrs. J 9/28/12 45/45 points =

"Imagine a room. It's 11 feet by 11 feet --- about the size of your average bedroom, perhaps. Inside is a bed, a dresser, a table, a shelf on the wall, a trash can, a television, a small refrigerator and a stove, and a small bathroom with a tub. Everything you own is in the room. There are no windows, only a skylight. Now imagine that skylight is covered with a carbon mesh that makes the glass impossible to break. The floor has been reinforced with chain link to make it impossible to dig up. No one can enter or leave the room unless they have the security code. The walls have been soundproofed so that no one can hear you scream.

This is the room --- a horrifically tricked-out garden shed, actually --- where Jack's Ma has lived for the past seven years, ever since she was kidnapped from college at the age of 19, trapped in this room and forced to have sex repeatedly with her captor (known to Jack as "Old Nick"), who visits daily. And this is the room where Jack was born five years ago, the only world he's ever known. As kids are prone to do, Jack names the inhabitants of Room: there's Table, Fort (made of empty boxes and cans) Labyrinth (made of empty toilet paper rolls) and Plant. But mostly, there's Jack and there's Ma. As far as Jack is concerned, they're the only two people in the world. And Room is the world. Ma decided a long time ago to maintain this fiction for Jack, to tell him that everything he sees on television, even the local news, is as make-believe as the Dora the Explorer cartoon he loves most of all.

That is, until Ma, plagued by ill health and worried about their captor's increasing financial instability, decides to try to escape. Her first step is to tell Jack to "unlie," as he puts it, to let him know that there is a whole world outside their four walls, a wonderful world that he's never seen. Jack's attempts to process these unimaginable concepts result in some of the book's most poignant reflections.

What's most remarkable about ROOM is that, despite its obvious parallels to certain much-hyped real-life cases, Donoghue appears to take great pains not only to eschew sensationalism in her own writing but also to inject a measure of hope and wonder. Although Ma's re-entry into the world is fraught with frustrations, sadness and overwhelming emotions, and although Jack's entry into Outside for the first time is marked by fears and misunderstandings, his narrative of discovery is also a remarkable window on the world. In many ways, Jack is like a hyper-literate, painstakingly observant newborn, taking in the world and all its wonders and terrors for the first time, but able to narrate his experience.

Reading ROOM is, in many ways, like opening that Door and making those discoveries --- many of which we take for granted --- alongside him. On meeting Jack, most readers will want to hold his hand or bundle him into their arms and cry a while. But then they'll be eager to walk with him into Outside, to see it, as if through his eyes, for the first time."

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This is one of my important books because it was something extremely different then what I normally read and I thought it was an amazing story that I wanted others to know about. This book brought me right into the room and made me feel claustrophobic just reading about the close quarters. I really enjoyed how the book was written by Jack's point of view and how each thing in the room was real to him and how he worded seeing each object. My favorite part of all was seeing Jack become brave and do what was needed of him to help Ma and him escape from Old Nick. But it upset me how Ma just wanted nothing more then to be far away from Jack after they had escaped when he was the one who saved her. Though it was even more entertaining to see Jack try and understand the real world because it was all so new to him and made you really look at the world through his eyes as someone who can't believe all of the things we have in the world can really exists. I just really thought this was a different and intriguing book and I am extremely glad I gave it a chance.