This is one of the best books I have read. Set in the south it has wonderful characters who have a wonderful story to tell. A book that is hard to put down. ( )

The book tells the story of Skeeter, a university graduate who returns to her hometown in Mississippi in 1962, and the black maids she interviews about their lives as ‘the help’ to her friends, in the hopes of establishing her own career as a writer.

Some of the characters were more interesting and realistic to me than others, but the real strength of the book for me was in the way it imaginatively opened a door into another time and place, and depicted that different world in an evocative and thought-provoking manner. ( )

Nothing makes me happier than to add 5 stars next to a book title, which I will gladly do to this book...The Help. Words cannot say how much I enjoyed this story....and if you love a good southern novel complete with magnolias, sweltering heat and the ubiquitous controlling mother, then you will too. ( )

A good old fashioned well written novel set in the south in the 60s. Good read. ( )

My cousin sent me this book after she finished reading it. What a wonderful book! It was very intense and seemed true to life.

I don't have much to base that impression on because my mother never had a full-time maid, but I did go home on the bus several times with Miss Loretta, who did Mother's ironing once a week. She introduced me as "my White folks' child" and let me help her shell black-eyed peas for supper. Mother would pick me up later.

I can't remember the woman's name who ironed for Mother later in my life, but the first day she was there, we fixed a sandwich for lunch and told her we left the stuff out if she wanted one. Well, she made a sandwich and was standing at the sink. Mother asked her what she was doing. When she said she was eating her lunch, Mother told her to come sit down because she had stood up all morning ironing and needed a break. She looked uncomfortable, but after a few times, she started sitting down with us without being asked, and she used to bring sheet music once in a while to use the piano -- usually something they were doing at church. I used to talk to her a lot, too -- it was in the mid-1950s, so you can imagine our conversations.

Then Mrs. Jackson started coming in every other Saturday some time after Daddy died and was still there when Mother died. She was like part of the family. My young granddaughter even called her "Aunt Jackson" with no prompting from anyone. I was visiting Mother as much as I could so got to know Mrs. Jackson fairly well. She went with us for visitation at the funeral home when Mother died. I loved her.

That little bit of experience, along with some other things I've read, are what make me thing the book is pretty well right. I wanted it to end, so I could see what happened, but I hated for it to end, too. It was hard to put down. I'm just grateful that I was taught not to act like some of those idiot women in The Help. I can imagine how the maids must have felt listening to those women talk about them like that, and still having to work for them. The women ate the food that the maids fixed for them but didn't want to use the same bathroom -- the epitome of stupidity if you ask me.

I almost forgot Miss Sadie. When I was a small child, my grandmother had no washing machine and would do her light laundry -- dresses, underwear, etc. -- by hand. Miss Sadie would do the sheets and towels, bringing a clean set one Saturday and picking up the dirties to bring back clean the next week. I bet she did the laundry out in the back yard in a pot over a fire the way my aunt used to do many years ago. Now that I think of it, I'm not sure I really knew that Miss Sadie was Black when I was a child. Surely I did but just never thought of it.

At any rate, this is one of the best books I've read in a while. ( )