The Help by Kathryn Stockette and published by Amy Einhorn Books/Putnam is one of those mirroring novels where you just know that the author put a little piece of her soul into every chapter.
Skeeter Phelan lives her somewhat comfortable life with her uncomfortable friends in the deep south of Jackson, Mississippi in the early 1960s. All around her the times are a changing, and she is the only one that seems to notice that maybe there is something a little more important out there than whether or not the Junior League of mean girls get their way. Skeeter wants to do something with her life, but just out of college, she isn’t sure what.
Aibileen is a black maid serving in a white home, who can’t dwell on the fact that her heart breaks every time the sweet white child she has raised turns out to be just like his or her parents, who think the colored are a different species from white folk. Entrusted to In fact, Aibileen, eager to correct this attitude with her current charge, makes up secret bedtime stories that star such characters as Martian Luther King.
Together, Skeeter and Aibileen embark on an unlikely project, a controversial book from the maids’ point of view of what it is like to work for a white family. As the project grows, more and more maids are stepping up to share their stories, from the mundane to the surreal, hoping against hope to blast through the inheritance of the antebellum days and bring sanity to a culture where accidently walking in the wrong door if you are “colored” will leave you beaten half to death and blinded for life.
The colorful characters, complete with controversial black southern dialogue are vivid, warm and very real, very human and very likeable, from the “sass-mouth Minnie” to the clueless Celia Foote. All of them are fallible, which makes you want to love them all the more.