The Help

Summary: 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, 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.

What I thought: This was a five star book for me. I really started to question what kind of person I would be if I lived in the South in the 60's. I really hope I would have been a Skeeter and had the guts to stick up to Hilly! I found myself cheering and crying right a long with the characters. It makes me sick that the world used to be like that and I'm really glad I didn't live in those times.