The Help by Kathryn Stockett

From Goodreads:

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. 

The Help, like The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society before it, got a lot of buzz that for some reason had me assured that I would not care for it. I am so weird that way, but I just think they are never going to live up to the hype. And then I'm all surprised when they do.

My sister got it for my mom for Mother's Day and I was at their house and needed a book to read while nursing and it was just THERE so..I read the first chapter. And I totally stole it so I could finish it.

There was so much in this book that could have gone wrong, like the changing narrators or the southern accents (they can be so hard to read when written phonetically), but none of that tripped me up. I love that it was about race relations during a particularly volatile time in America's history but was also about women and the relationships we have with one another. It was both funny and heartbreaking. And generally really impressive for a debut novel.

I want the three narrators to be my neighbors and we'll be the type of friends who always leave their back doors unlocked in case there is gossip or cooking to be shared and I will gain 50 pounds because they deep fry everything. I just loved them.

I think my favorite part was when two white women are "worried about" another friend whom they believe is mixed up in the civil rights movement. "The racists," they whisper fearfully, "They're out there!" But one of those women is probably the most racist character in the book. I thought that small scene summed up so much in such a small interaction and Stockett does really well with those kinds of details.

 Just a generally awesome book.