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If You Like The Help
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Kathryn Stockett's multifaceted first novel "The Help" explores race relations in Jackson, Mississippi during the sixties. Similar themes abound in these moving and often timeless stories.
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Berg, Elizabeth We are All Welcome Here It is the summer of 1964. In Tupelo, Mississippi, the town of Elvis’s birth, tensions are mounting over civil-rights demonstrations occurring ever more frequently–and violently–across the state. But in Paige Dunn’s small, ramshackle house, there are more immediate concerns. Challenged by the effects of the polio she contracted during her last month of pregnancy, Paige is nonetheless determined to live as normal a life as possible and to raise her daughter, Diana, in the way she sees fit–with the support of her tough-talking black caregiver, Peacie. 2006 Adult Fiction Book BERG |
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Briscoe, Connie A Long Way from Home A black woman's story, from slavery to freedom. She is Clara whose mother was a maid for President Madison. When he dies Clara is sold along with other chattels and the novel follows her ups and downs before and after the Civil War. 1999 Adult Fiction Book BRISCOE |
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Fairbairn, Ann Five Smooth Stones This gripping bestseller, first published in 1966, has continued to captivate readers with its wide-ranging yet intimate portrait of an America sundered by racial conflict. David Champlin is a black man born into poverty in Depression-era New Orleans who makes his way up the ladder of success, only to sacrifice everything to lead his people in the civil rights movement. Sara Kent is the white girl who loves David from the moment she first sees him, and who struggles against his belief that a marriage for them would be wrong in the violent world he has to confront. And the “five smooth stones” are those the biblical David carried against Goliath. By the time this novel comes to its climax of horror, bloodshed, and hope, readers will be convinced that its enduring popularity is fully justified. 2009 Adult Fiction Book |
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Flagg, Fannie Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Cafe Gray-headed Mrs. Threadgoode tells her life story to Evelyn, who is in the sad slump of middle age. The tale she tells is also of two women--of the irrepressibly daredevilish tomboy Idgie and her friend Ruth--who back in the thirties ran a little place in Whistle Stop, Alabama, a Southern cafe offering good barbecue, good coffee and all kinds of love and laughter, even an occasional murder. And as the past unfolds, the present--for Evelyn and the reader--will never be quite the same again. Idgie Threadgoode is a true original. 1997 Adult Fiction Book FLAGG |
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Frank, Dorothea Benton. Sullivan's Island : a Lowcountry Tale In alternating chapters telling of her difficult childhood in the 1960s on Sullivan's Island and in downtown Charleston in the 1990s, Susan Hayes deals with her incredible island family, her job at the Charleston County Library, and her life as a single mother. 1999 Adult Fiction Book |
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Gaines, Ernest J. The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman Originally published in 1971, this novel spans 100 years of American history--from the early 1860s to the onset of the civil rights movement in the 1960s--in following the life of the elderly Jane Pittman, who witnessed those turbulent years. 1972 Adult Fiction Book GAINES |
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Grissom, Kathleen The Kitchen House Orphaned while onboard ship from Ireland, seven-year-old Lavinia arrives on the steps of a tobacco plantation where she is to live and work with the slaves of the kitchen house. Under the care of Belle, the master's illegitimate daughter, Lavinia becomes deeply bonded to her adopted family, though she is set apart from them by her white skin. Eventually, Lavinia is accepted into the world of the big house, where the master is absent and the mistress battles opium addiction. Lavinia finds herself perilously straddling two very different worlds. When she is forced to make a choice, loyalties are brought into question, dangerous truths are laid bare, and lives are put at risk. 2010 Adult Fiction Book |
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Hoffman, Beth Saving CeeCee Honeycutt Steel Magnolias meets The Help in this Southern debut novel sparkling with humor, heart, and feminine wisdom. Laugh-out-loud funny, Hoffman's charming work offers the story of a young girl who loses one mother and finds many others. 2010 Adult Fiction Book HOFFMAN |
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Jordan, Hillary Mudbound Prejudice takes many forms, both subtle and brutal. It is 1946, and city-bred Laura McAllan is trying to raise her children on her husband's Mississippi Delta farm, a place she finds foreign and frightening. In the midst of the family's struggles, two young men return from the war to work the land. Jamie McAllan, Laura's brother-in-law, is everything her husband is not, charming, handsome, and haunted by his memories of combat. Ronsel Jackson, eldest son of the black sharecroppers who live on the McAllan farm, has come home with the shine of a war hero. But no matter his bravery in defense of his country, he is still considered less than a man in the Jim Crow South. It is the unlikely friendship of these brothers-in-arms that drives this powerful novel to its inexorable conclusion. 2008 Adult Fiction Book JORDAN |
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Kidd, Sue Monk The Secret Life of Bees Set in South Carolina in 1964, The Secret Life of Bees tells the story of Lily Owens, whose life has been shaped around the blurred memory of the afternoon her mother was killed. When Lily's fierce-hearted "stand-in mother," Rosaleen, insults three of the town's fiercest racists, Lily decides they should both escape to Tiburon, South Carolina, a town that holds the secret to her mother's past. There they are taken in by an eccentric trio of black beekeeping sisters who introduce Lily to a mesmerizing world of bees, honey, and the Black Madonna who presides over their household. 2002 Adult Fiction Book KIDD |
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Lee, Harper To Kill a Mockingbird Harper Lee's classic novel of a lawyer in the Deep South defending a black man charged with the rape of a white girl. One of the best-loved stories of all time, To Kill a Mockingbird has earned many distinctions since its original publication in 1960. It won the Pulitzer Prize, has been translated into more than forty languages, sold more than thirty million copies worldwide, and been made into an enormously popular movie. 2006 Adult Fiction Book |
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Lent, Jeffrey In the Fall In the twilight of the Civil War, Leah, an escaped slave, discovers Norman Pelham, a wounded Union soldier who lies dying on a battlefield outside Richmond. After she nurses him back to health, Norman brings her to his family farm in Vermont as his wife, and they begin a family. Now the mother of three, and, however begrudgingly, accepted in the community, Leah travels back to the South of her birth and returns with a secret that threatens to destroy what she and Norman have created. 2000 Adult Fiction Book LENT |
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McCullers, Carson The Member of the Wedding Twelve-year-old Frankie is utterly, hopelessly bored with life until she hears about her older brother's wedding. Bolstered by lively conversations with her house servant, Berenice, and her six-year-old male cousin, not to mention her own unbridled imagination, Frankie takes on an overly active role in the wedding, hoping even to go, uninvited, on the honeymoon, so deep is her desire to be the member of something larger, more accepting than herself. 2004 Adult Fiction Book MCCULLE |
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Morrison, Toni Sula In clear, dark, resonant language, Nobel Prize winner Toni Morrison brilliantly evokes not only a bond between two lives, but the harsh, loveless, ultimately mad world in which that bond is destroyed, the world of the Bottom and its people. 1973 Adult Fiction Book MORRISON |
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Naslund, Sena Jeter Four Spirits Gender, race, and racial attitudes span the spectrum as Naslund embeds personal stories--individuals' needs, goals, and frustrations--within the overall context of the country's changing climate in Alabama in the early 1960s. 2003 Adult Fiction Book NASLUND |
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Nicholas, Denise Freshwater Road When University of Michigan sophomore Celeste Tyree travels to Mississippi to volunteer with the Civil Rights movement, she is assigned to help register voters in the already infamous town of Pineyville. While Celeste befriends several members of the community, there are also those who are threatened by her and the change she represents. 2005 Adult Fiction Book NICHOLA |
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Perkins-Valdez, Dolen Wench Tawawa House in many respects is like any other American resort before the Civil War. Situated in Ohio, this idyllic retreat is particularly nice in the summer when the Southern humidity is too much to bear. It provides more privacy, which best suits the needs of the Southern white men who vacation there every summer with their black, enslaved mistresses. Lizzie, Reenie, and Sweet are regulars at Tawawa House. They have become friends over the years as they reunite and share developments in their own lives and on their respective plantations. They don't bother too much with questions of freedom, though the resort is situated in free territory, but when truth-telling Mawu comes to the resort and starts talking of running away, things change. 2010 Adult Fiction Book PERKINS |
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Sanders, Dori Clover After her father dies within hours of being married to a white woman, a ten-year-old black girl learns with her new mother to overcome grief and to adjust to a new place in their rural black South Carolina community. 1990 Adult Fiction Book SANDERS |
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Walker, Alice The Color Purple This 1983 Pulitzer Prize-winning novel tells the story of Celie, an uneducated and abused black woman, as she struggles for empowerment during the 1930s. 1992 Adult Fiction Book WALKER |
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