This is one of those books that would have stayed on my tbr forever if I didn't have to read it for school. That's because I was a bit worried, I had heard differing opinions about the movie, some people loved it, some others felt it was just another movie about a rich white woman "saving" poor black women. I haven't watched the movie, but I can tell you the book isn't that at all.

First of all, the protagonist of the book isn't (only) Skeeter, the white woman, but the book is divided into three POVs, Aibleen, Minny, and Skeeter, and I'm fairly sure Aibleen gets the most total chapters. She's definitely my favourite character in the book, she feels like an all around person. She is rightfully unsure about accepting Skeeter's offer of writing about her life, but eventually it's her and Minny's courage that get the other maids to join. The three main characters are obviously the most real, you understand how their age, social condition and life experiences influence their thinking and their attitude. But all the other maids and the white women feel so real I often had to remind myself this wasn't a memoir.

The only outright "bad guy" was Miss Hilly, and you totally buy her racism and disgust for black people, only fueled by the fact no one has ever tried to challenge her. But most of the other characters are more nuanced, Skeeter has her own shortcomings too. Most of the maids have nice stories about the ladies they work for, still knowing there's some things that can't be talked about, that they can still get fired out of nowhere. These families will pay their help's kids' college tuitions, but will have a separate bathroom in the house for them, believing they'll carry diseases.

I said this book wasn't a memoir, but it does contain a lot of real life elements, which is what makes it so good. It touches on more themes than just segregation, it talks about domestic abuse, motherhood, woman's role in society, the hypocrisy of influential people, selfishness, social stigma, and all of these themes are intertwined and form a clear portrait of the South of the USA in the 60s. And as the author draws on her life and her relationship with her family's maid, trying to shed a light on these often overlooked stories, it becomes difficult, but absolutely necessary for modern readers like me, with no ties to this part of history, to realize that all this was still going on while our parents or grandparents were growing up.

The book ends in 1964, year of the Civil Rights Act, with hope for the characters and their future. They are aware of the danger they are facing by writing about their lives, they see it in first person, and that their struggles are definitely not over, but there's a fleeting hope that things will eventually get better, if not for them, for the women that will come after them.