Title: The Help
First published: 2009
Description: 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.
Subjects: novels, Fiction, Civil rights movements, Household employees, African American women, literary fiction, historical fiction, domestic fiction, Civil Rights Movement, Literature, mothers, nyt:hardcover_fiction=2009-03-29, New York Times bestseller, Housekeepers, caregivers, friends, daughters, Reading Level-Grade 7, Reading Level-Grade 6, Reading Level-Grade 9, Reading Level-Grade 8, Reading Level-Grade 11, Reading Level-Grade 10, Reading Level-Grade 12, Fictional Works, Literary, Historical, Small Town & Rural, African American, NEW LIST 20091215, Fiction, historical, Mississippi, fiction, African americans, fiction, Large type books, Derechos civiles, Novela, Movimientos sociales, Afronorteamericanos, Mujeres, Historia, Spanish language materials, New York Times reviewed, Fiction, historical, general
Places: Jackson (Miss.), Jackson, Mississippi, University of Mississippi, Chicago
People: Eugenia Phelan, Treelore Clark, The Leefolts, Mrs. Walters, Hilly Holbrook, Aibileen Clark, Minny Jackson, Mae Mobley, Elaine Stein, Yule May, Constantine, Martin Luther King Jr. (1929-1968), James Meredith, John F. Kennedy
Time periods: 1962, 1960, 1960-1964