About her:
Kathryn Stockett was born and raised in Jackson, Mississippi. After
graduating from the University of Alabama with a degree in English and
Creative Writing, she moved to New York City, where she worked in
magazine publishing and marketing for nine years. The Help is her first
novel.
1-The Help:
Three ordinary women are about to take one extraordinary step.
Twenty-two-year-old Skeeter has just returned home after graduating
from Ole Miss. She may have a degree, but it is 1962, Mississippi, and
her mother will not be happy till Skeeter has a ring on her finger.
Skeeter would normally find solace with her beloved maid Constantine,
the woman who raised her, but Constantine has disappeared and no one
will tell Skeeter where she has gone.
Aibileen is a black maid,
a wise, regal woman raising her seventeenth white child. Something has
shifted inside her after the loss of her own son, who died while his
bosses looked the other way. She is devoted to the little girl she
looks after, though she knows both their hearts may be broken.
Minny, Aibileen’s best friend, is short, fat, and perhaps the sassiest
woman in Mississippi. She can cook like nobody’s business, but she
can’t mind her tongue, so she’s lost yet another job. Minny finally
finds a position working for someone too new to town to know her
reputation. But her new boss has secrets of her own.
Seemingly
as different from one another as can be, these women will nonetheless
come together for a clandestine project that will put them all at risk.
And why? Because they are suffocating within the lines that define
their town and their times. And sometimes lines are made to be crossed.
In pitch-perfect voices, Kathryn Stockett creates three extraordinary
women whose determination to start a movement of their own forever
changes a town, and the way women—mothers, daughters, caregivers,
friends—view one another. A deeply moving novel filled with poignancy,
humor, and hope, The Help is a timeless and universal story about the lines we abide by, and the ones we don’t.