'The Help' by Kathryn Stockett

Author Kathryn Stockett tugs at the heartstrings of many readers with her very first novel The Help. Set in 1962, this gripping tale is about the "help"; black maids that were hired to help the pretentious and often unforgiving housewives in a rural Mississippi town. But the town's squeaky clean image is challenged when a young white woman secretly lobbies for change, ultimately risking her reputation by doing the unthinkable.

With the civil rights movement just beginning, the setting of this Mississippi town is completely ignorant to the reformation occurring around them. These radical changes were spoken of in a passive manner amongst housewives, as if their town was not to be associated with these efforts.

The narration begins with Aibileen, a black woman who is hired as a maid for a white housewife. Aibileen's narrative is also shared with her best friend Minny, a black maid whose bad habit of running her mouth leaves her jobless, hopelessly searching for work.

The reader sees the cruel and demoralizing ways these hired women were treated, but also sees the incredibly tight, familial bonds these black women formed with each other. Together they make a unified and merciful force, a community in itself.

Stockett brings forth a third narrator, Eugenia "Skeeter" Phelan, a young white woman. A recent graduate who is more interested in a job than a man, she quickly realizes this concept isn't considered normal in her social circle. Stockett shows the subtle but painful ways Skeeter did not fit in with her family, friends, and her town as a whole.

Skeeter lived a life of complacency, until her best friend upstages the town and urges the community to create toilets outside their houses for "the help" because of their unsanitary nature. Enraged, Skeeter secretly asks a group of black maids to help her write a book--anonymously-- that catalogs the stories each maid had experienced while working in a white woman's household.

A deeply dramatic novel, peppered with humor here and there, proves to be authentic to its core. The Help holds several opposites together on its pages--good and evil; fair and cruel; black and white. But one message you should take with you when you close this book is that these women were only as different as they made themselves out to be; to grow as a single entity is to fully understand the meaning of acceptance.