The Help by Kathryn Stockett
Published 2009 · 145,000 words · about 10 hours at an average pace · Historical Fiction, Literary Fiction, Southern & Regional American Fiction
How hard is The Help to read?
The Help scores 20 out of 100 for difficulty on ReadingRate, making it relatively accessible. The score is a weighted composite of nine measures: four of how hard the prose is to parse, five of how hard the meaning is to extract.
- Vocabulary: 22 out of 100
- Accessible prose. Southern dialect rendered phonetically in some sections.
- Sentence structure: 20 out of 100
- Abstraction: 20 out of 100
- Concrete social narrative. Racial dynamics shown through daily domestic interactions.
- Information density: 32 out of 100
- Three narrators, historical context, and community dynamics create moderate density.
- Narrative indirection: 18 out of 100
- Linear plot. Three rotating perspectives create dramatic irony but not structural complexity.
- Symbolic density: 18 out of 100
- The chocolate pie, the separate bathroom, and the book-within-the-book as recurring motifs.
- Ironic distance: 15 out of 100
- Emotionally direct. Minny's voice provides some comic distance.
- Resolution withholding: 22 out of 100
- Will the book be published? Will the maids be discovered? Tension sustained throughout.
- Structural complexity: 22 out of 100
- Three rotating first-person narrators with a linear timeline.
How The Help is regarded
The Help holds a literary regard score of 39 out of 100, weighing its place in the canon, its critical reception, its influence on other writers, and the standing of its author. Regard is measured separately from difficulty: a demanding book is not necessarily an admired one.