Eugenia “Skeeter” Phelan graduates from Old Miss in the 1960s and returns home to Jackson, looking for a topic to write about. She decides to tell the story of the Help. Skeeter was raised by a kindly black maid, as were many of her friends. Now they’re having babies and hiring black maids of their own. Skeeter interviews the maids of Jackson to find out what it’s really like to be a black woman who leaves her own babies at home so she can earn a living raising white women’s babies.

I started the egalley of this new summer release back when I was vetting books for the 2026 Summer Reading Guide and the narrator's voice just didn't grab me. At a whopping 656 pages, I wasn't inclined to stick it out, and put it down. But this summer MMD Book Clubbers kept telling me how much they enjoyed this book on audio, and advised I be patient until I meet both main characters on the page. I'm so glad I gave it a second chance because I LOVED my listening experience! The story is set in 1933: the first-person narrators are Meg, an eleven-year-old resident of Oxford, Mississippi's orphanage who is convinced her mother didn't mean to leave her, and Birdie, a not-so-old old maid who travels from the rural family home to Oxford to visit her well-married sister, but really, to beg for money to carry the family through the hard times. But what she finds .. is NOT what she expected. And then Birdie's story intersects with Meg's and the hijinx really begin. This was a walk-another-mile audiobook; I felt like I was in good hands from beginning to end, in no small part thanks to Jenna Lamia and January LaVoy's narration.