The Help

By Kathryn Stockett

Set in Jackson, Mississippi in the early 1960s when segregation was at its peak, and the fight for 'integration of the races' had just begun in the US. The book plays out in three different voices, that of Aibileen, Minny and Miss Skeeter. The first two are black maids, and the last, a moral misfit, an educated white woman who gets wondering about the blacks' perspective of the way things were. Together they brave odds, and risk everything to chronicle black maids' stories - good, happy, ugly - bringing into print voices that had never been heard before. 

The story has real events interspersed - sit-ins at the Woolworth counter, killing of Medgar Evans, Kennedy's assassination, Martin Luther King's famous march in Washington, but the book is really just an entertaining read, and covers issues on a broad, top level.
It always seems ridiculous this suppression based on race, suppression of any sort for that matter. Just wonder what the future would find so about our times. A lot, hopefully.