A Main Selection of the Book-of-the-Month Club -- Twenty-two-year-old Skeeter has just returned home after graduating from Ole Miss. Aibileen is a wise, regal black maid raising her seventeenth white child. Minny, Aibileen"s best friend, can cook like nobody"s business but can"t mind her tongue. It is 1962, and these three ordinary women are about to take one extraordinary step that forever changes a town and the way women -- mothers, daughters, caregivers, friends -- view one another.