The Help by Kathryn Stockett

It's 1962 in Jackson, Mississippi. The white folks want nothing to do with Civil Rights and some of the black population are too scared to fight for them. When Skeeter, a white woman who recently graduated from Ole Miss, asks Aibileen, her best friend's black maid, if she wants to change how things are in Jackson, she's immediately shut down. It's not only dangerous, but illegal, to talk about integration, and Aibileen knows her life would be at risk if she tried to change anything. But Skeeter just wants to tell stories about what it's like for black women working as maids and nannies in white families, and she eventually convinces Aibileen to write with her. Aibileen convinces her best friend Minny and ten other maids to share their stories with Skeeter in the hopes that the country will know what life is really like in the segregated South. Skeeter is ostracized by her friends, the same women who appear in the maids' stories, as Aibileen and Minny fear for their jobs and their lives.

The lives of southern white women and their “separate but equal” black maids are laid bare in this novel about Civil Rights in the 1960s. The author weaves actual historic events, like the murder of Medgar Evers by the KKK, Martin Luther King Jr.'s March on Washington D.C., and the assassination of JFK, into the fictional people of the real Jackson, Mississippi. Aibileen, Minny, and Skeeter are brilliant narrators, each with her own unique voice. Aibileen and Minny show us the love-hate relationship between white families and the black women they let raise their children, even if they aren't allowed to use the same bathroom or eat at the same table. Skeeter shows us that sometimes it just takes one privileged person who's willing and able to say, “This is wrong; we shouldn't be doing this; it needs to stop.” Lives are destroyed and redeemed many times over in this instant classic.