The Help by Kathryn Stockett on audio book

It's the early 1960s in Jackson, Mississippi. Aibileen is a black maid working for a white women raising her children. Minny is a black maid who is having difficulty finding a job despite being the best cook around since she has a habit of telling people what she thinks. Skeeter is a 23 year-old white women who has just finished college and is finding she isn't fitting in so well in Jackson. These three women come together on a project that is putting them all in danger.

Audio books can be tricky. A bad audio book can totally ruin the story. Last summer, I attempted to listen to Ender's Game on audio book. It was awful. I didn't make it through it, and thought that Ender's Game wasn't good, and not only not good, but boring. Luckily, everyone I mentioned this to said, "What? Are you crazy? Ender's Game is awesome." So I finally read it myself. And it turns out that Ender's Game is, in fact, awesome. It was just that terrible audio book.

This, however, was an AMAZING audio book. The story was great, and I'm sure I would have loved it had I read it myself, but the readers really added something. It was a great choice to listen to on audio. There were three readers, since the book is told from the prospective of the three main characters, so there's a reader each for Aibileen, Minny and Skeeter. The women also did voices for all the other characters that spoke during their sections. They were great.

Anna, Jamie and I listened to this as we went to D.C. and back, and we were so in to it. We were gasping out loud, and had to keep stopping the CD to discuss things. What happened to Constantine? What on Earth is going on with Miss. Celia? What was the terrible, awful thing Minny did? WHY WON'T THEY TELL US? I think had I been reading this myself, I would have been skipping around to find out the secrets. There were so many secrets!

The audio book is 18 hours, 8 minutes, so we didn't finish the whole thing on the trip. For the next few days, I was excited to get in the car because the book was waiting for me. I highly recommend it!