Jackson, Mississippi, in the early 1960s is a town run on unspoken rules, and no one knows them better than the Black maids who raise white children and keep white houses. Aibileen has buried a son and poured her grief into the little girl she now cares for. Her friend Minny is the best cook in town and the sharpest tongue, a combination that keeps getting her fired. Into their world steps Eugenia "Skeeter" Phelan, a young white woman home from college with ambitions to write and a growing unease about the segregation she was raised to accept.
Skeeter proposes something dangerous: a book that would tell the maids' stories in their own words. What begins as a few furtive interviews becomes a secret, risky collaboration that could cost the women their jobs, their safety, or worse, in a town where crossing the color line has consequences.
Told in the alternating voices of Aibileen, Minny, and Skeeter, Kathryn Stockett's debut is a warm, tense, and often funny novel about courage, complicity, and the friendships that form across a rigid divide. It is a story about who gets to tell their own life, and what it costs to finally speak.