The Help really is a special book and I encourage anyone and everyone to check it out. The Help changed the lives of the women in the book and I feel as if somehow it changed my life too. It's definitely a hard subject to write about and we see that from both Kathryn Stockett's and Skeeter's writing. However, the characters were well built and the plot was very intriguing. It's hard for me to fault this book, except I feel that Skeeter did not quite understand the danger she was putting the maids in to help her write the book, as there was much more risk for black maids to tell stories about their employers than it was for Skeeter to write them. It is told in alternating viewpoints from the three main characters, so we get to see from both sides of the story in this book from the League ladies such as the truly venomous Miss Hilly, to the maids who work for them and basically raise their children single handedly. The way in which Stockett has written about her characters is so believable that I didn't find myself thinking 'no-one would have said or done that.' As I was reading this book, it didn't cross my mind at all that it was fiction because everything Kathryn Stockett wrote about seemed thoroughly believable, particularly coming from such different characters. This book has characters in it that you are meant to empathise with and those, of course, whom you are meant to dislike. What follows was, for me, a rollercoaster ride of emotion, as we hear stories of cruelty and humiliation but also those of tenderness. In a time when even talking to a black person was shunned, these three women team up on a project that will put them all at risk in an attempt to change the minds of the Jackson residents. The book is told in the alternating voices of the women. Kathryn Stockett's first novel, The Help, is an engaging tale of three women, two black and one white, set in Jackson, Mississippi in 1962, at the beginning of the civil rights movement. When Skeeter gets the opportunity of a lifetime to become a published author, she of course takes it but in order for this to happen, she has to write about things that people need to read about. The Help by Kathryn Stockett, Amy Einhorn Books/Penguin Putnam, 2009, 464 pp.

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