Our Take: Stockett’s first novel and engrossing read could be this decade’s To Kill a Mockingbird. Set in the 1960’s in Jackson, Mississippi, she tells the story of three women – 2 black maids and a white recent college graduate writer- and how they band together to rally for women’s rights and human dignity. Told with humor, compassion, colorful descriptions and realistic dialogue, chapters are narrated by the fully-developed characters giving you a sense of what it must have like for wise, older women of color to work for 20-something Junior Leaguers in the south. This book will grab you in the first chapter and keep you laughing, crying and enthralled till the end.

A Few Good Lines: That was the day my whole world went black. Air look black, sun look black. I laid up in bed and stared at the black walls a my house. Minny came ever day to make sure I was still breathing. feed me food to keep me living. Took three months fore I even look out the window, see if the world still there. I was surprise to see the world didn’t stop just cause my boy did. Five months after the funeral, lifted myself up out a bed, I put on my white uniform and put my little gold cross back around my neck and I went to wait on Miss Leefolt cause she just have her baby girl. But it weren’t too long before I seen something in me had changed. A bitter seed was planted inside a me. And I just didn’t feel so accepting anymore.