A narrative of black women (maids, family caretakers) in the South during the early sixties. Twenty-two-year old Skeeter arrives home after graduating from college to discover her childhood companion, Constantine, is no longer in the home and no one will tell her what happened. Skeeter's social life has taken an adjustment in that all her girlfriends are already married and raising families and she doesn't quite feel that she fits in anymore. Taking a journalism job with the newspaper, she has to rely on Aibileen (her friend Elizabeth's maid) to answer the homemaker questions for the column she is to write.
Aibileen has many years of experience raising white people's children (she is on her seventeenth) and when her son is killed two years previously, she has an ache in her heart that two-year-old Mae Mobley fills and she treats her like a daughter. Minnie is Aibileen's close friend, short, fat and sassy, and between the two of them, the reader gets some pretty clear ideas about their life at that time. A very well written novel based on some of Ms. Stockett's own experiences. Sad but hopeful reading. Sandy Penton
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