The help

<a href="http://doughertygang.wordpress.com/2011/08/10/the-help-by-kathryn-stockett/">http://doughertygang.wordpress.com/2011/08/10/the-help-by-kathryn-stockett/</a>

The Help is a 2009 novel by American author Kathryn Stockett. It is about African American maids working in white households in Jackson, Mississippi during the early 1960s.
The novel is told from the point of view of three narrators: Aibileen Clark, a middle-aged African-American maid who has spent her life raising white children, and who has recently lost her only son; Minny Jackson, an African-American maid whose back-talk towards her employers results in her having to frequently change jobs, exacerbating her desperate need for work as well as her family’s struggle with money; and Eugenia “Skeeter” Phelan, a young white woman and recent college graduate who, after moving back home, discovers that a maid that helped raise her since childhood has abruptly disappeared and her attempts to find her have come to naught. The stories of the three women intertwine to explain how life in Jackson, Mississippi revolves around “the help”, with complex relations of power, money, emotion, and intimacy tying together the white and black families of Jackson.
A USA Today article called it one of 2009′s “summer sleeper hits”.[1] An early review in The New York Times notes Stockett’s “affection and intimacy buried beneath even the most seemingly impersonal household connections” and says the book is a “button-pushing, soon to be wildly popular novel”.[2] The Atlanta Journal-Constitution said of the book, “This heartbreaking story is a stunning debut from a gifted talent”.[3]
The novel is Stockett’s first. It took her five years to complete the book, which was rejected by at least 45 literary agents.[4] The Help has since been published in 35 countries and three languages.[5] As of August 2011, it has sold five million copies and has spent more than a 100 weeks on the The New York Times Best Seller list.[6][7]
The Help’s audiobook version is narrated by Jenna Lamia, Bahni Turpin, Octavia Spencer, and Cassandra Campbell. Spencer was Stockett’s original inspiration for the character of Minny.[4]

It took me a while to adjust to reading the written dialect/accent of Aibilene and Minny, but once I got going, I fell in love with this book. The characters felt like real people--even Hilly wasn't a one-dimensional villain.  I was never entirely sure where the story would lead, not even when I guessed a bit of someone's secrets here or there.  I had a hard time putting the book down at the end of my lunch breaks because I wanted to find out what happened next.

I kept wanting to put everyone in a room and make them TALK to each other and see how artificial and arbitrary their differences were, founded on ignorance and prejudice.  (I especially wanted Minny to talk to Miss Celia.)  But then, I was born more than a decade after this book took place and in an entirely different part of the country.  I have very little personal experience with racial prejudice.  Or domestic help, for that matter!  :)  I don't know how I would have handled the cruelty and shameful miscarriages of justice.  Would I have been brave enough to risk my life to challenge the hateful status quo?  It's really amazing to me just how far we've come in a generation.  To have improved that much gives me hope that we will be able to continue the progress into--and beyond--the next generation.

For Reader's Advisors:  story and character doorways, with setting also pretty important.