This book is filled with wonderful characters who live in Jackson, MS in 1962 where many of the old ways are still going on even though a man named Martin Luther King is doing his best to change things. Skeeter Phelan graduated from Ole Miss and came home with a degree instead of a husband, much to her mother's dismay. Aibilean has been working for forty years as "house help" and she raises white women's children until they begin to feel that whites are somehow superior. There is Minny who is too sassy to be a good maid. She's been fired from 17 jobs and she desperately needs another one. The maid who raised Skeeter, Claiborne, is missing and no one will tell Skeeter where she went or why. Elizabeth is a busy young mom who would rather let a black woman raise her children than to have to love them herself. Hilly Holbrook is president of the Junior League and her goal is to have everyone install separate bathroom facilities so the help won't be using the same toilets as the white people.
This book was recommended to me and everyone had good things to say about it. I believe it is the first novel that Kathryn Stockett has written. I loved it! It was poignant and funny. It really made me think about how complicated racial relations were in the South and how I hope we have gotten so far past all of this. It also made me think that every person deserves to be treated with dignity and that sometimes we all forget and feel that for one reason or another we are superior. This is a book that I will reccomend to other and that I won't forget for a long time.
Rating - A+
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