The Help (Audiobook)

Synopsis: 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 17th 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.

Review: I loved this book, it is absolutely perfectly read especially by the three women voicing Skeeter, Minny and Aibileen. Set in Jackson, Mississippi during the early 1960's when the civil rights movement was in it's infancy, it tells the tale of two black maids Aibileen and Minny.They've worked for white families as 'the help' for most of their lives, looking after their children as if they were their own and putting up with the sly remarks, insults and prejudice of the women they cook and clean for.

Miss Skeeter wants to be a writer, she has a job working for the local newspaper writing cleaning tips (as she still lives at home with her Mum and Dad, cleaning and household management is something she knows next to nothing about, but she asks Aibileen, her friend Elizabeth's maid, to help her). Skeeter feels uncomfortable over the way her friends treat 'the help' and she hits upon the idea of writing a book, that will tell the story of what it's like to be a black maid working for a white family. She needs to get as many of the maids as she can to tell her about their experiences, she will give them pseudonym's of course and she will write it anonymously. When she approaches Aibileen with this idea Aibileen is skeptical, infact she's adamant she won't do it and neither will any of the other maids, people have been lynched for less .. black people that is.

Skeeter persists and eventually they make a start on the book. But it's not just a dangerous time for the maids, it's a very dangerous time for Skeeter.

Full of the flavours of the deep south, it's a book to make you smile a lot but also to make you ashamed of those white ladies and their polite faced racism. The irony of them having one of their do-gooding fund raisers for the 'poor people of Africa', whilst treating their own maids like dirt was completely lost on them.

The only downside to it was it made me permanently hungry with it's constant talk of chicken pot and lemon chiffon pie's, angel cake's and hush puppies mmm mm.

I stretched it out for as long as I could, it was such an enjoyable listen.