The Help

Front Cover
Penguin, 2011 - Fiction - 534 pages
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.
 

Selected pages

Contents

Section 1
1
Section 2
14
Section 3
36
Section 4
55
Section 5
63
Section 6
82
Section 7
105
Section 8
121
Section 21
324
Section 22
333
Section 23
347
Section 24
354
Section 25
377
Section 26
392
Section 27
403
Section 28
435

Section 9
131
Section 10
144
Section 11
166
Section 12
177
Section 13
194
Section 14
214
Section 15
232
Section 16
243
Section 17
249
Section 18
269
Section 19
280
Section 20
308
Section 29
456
Section 30
472
Section 31
478
Section 32
483
Section 33
487
Section 34
501
Section 35
523
Section 36
525
Section 37
533
Section 38
535
Copyright

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About the author (2011)

Kathryn Stockett was born in 1969 in Mississippi. She graduated from the University of Alabama with a degree in English and Creative Writing. She soon got a job in magazine marketing and publishing in New York City. She became famous in 2009 with her debut novel, The Help. Her book tells the story of African-American Maids working in white households in Jackson Mississippi during the 1960's. It sold over ten million copies and spent more than 100 weeks on The New York Times Best Seller List.