December book: The Help by Kathryn Stockett
chosen by Sharon

Book Description:

Set in Jackson, Mississippi, in 1962, The Help is narrated by three women: Aibileen and Minny are both black maids working for ladies from the cream of white society, while Miss Skeeter is the 23-year-old daughter of one of those pillars of the community. Aibileen has raised 17 white children, but her own son has been recently killed in an accident; Minny is forever losing jobs because she talks back to her employers; and Miss Skeeter, so called because she looked like a mosquito when she was born, is ungainly and unmarried and seemingly the only one of her class able to see there might be something unjust about their society.

While Aibileen and Minny are just trying to get by, Skeeter is in the enviable position of being able to try to make something of her life. She wants to be a writer. Her first efforts are wonderfully wrong-headed, but inspired by thoughts of the woman who brought her up –  she hits on the idea of collating the stories of the domestic maids, voices never before heard in print. In 1962 this is not only a radical project, since if any of the white ladies found out their help had been talking in public they would have fired them on the spot, but also illegal in Mississippi, since it contravenes the notorious Jim Crow segregation laws.

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