The Help

Goodreads 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.

My Review:
This book is about what it was like living in Mississippi in the 1960's from the perspective of two black maid's and a young white female college graduate who pushed social boundaries by both wanting a writing career and not wanting to follow the segregation laws.

The book is written alternating the points of view of these three women, and it shows how they are much more the same than different.

This is the author's first book, but her writing is more like that of a seasoned writer. This is undoubtably one of the top ten books I've ever read. It begs so many questions about segregation, what it means to be human, and whether we are really different at all. It made me think of something I really have never given much thought to: because of segregation it wasn't just blacks who couldn't associate with whites but vice versa. A white person couldn't have a black friend in the 1960's because of segregation. This book incites so many profound questions, greatest of all being what does it mean to be human? It also makes one wonder if equality really exists and if not, will it ever?
5/5 stars