The Help

The Help, by Kathryn Stockett.

Mae Mobley was born on a early Sunday morning in August, 1960. A church baby we like to call it. Taking care a white babies, that's what I do, along with all the cooking and cleaning. I done raised seventeen kids in my lifetime. I know how to get them babies to sleep, stop crying, and go in the toilet bowl before they mamas even get out a bed in the morning.

This book was 444 pages long, and I flew through it in less than a day - that's how good it was. Many people had recommended it to me, but every time I checked it out from the library it inevitably became due, so this was the first chance I had to read it, and the rumors are true - it was excellent.

The book follows the lives of three or four African-American maids in the South (Jackson, Mississippi) in the 1960s, and also one ambitious white lady, who decides to write a book, anonymously, with first-person accounts of what it's like to be an African-American maid in a household during this time period. I was surprised to find out that the author of this book, Kathryn Stockett, is white, because most of the chapters are written in first-person, and as you can tell by the passage from the book included up above, it does NOT sound like a white woman talking. The characters in the novel were very memorable, and they will probably stick with me for a long time after reading this book.

4.5 stars out of 5.