Help While Waiting for "The Help"

Set in 1960s segregated Mississippi, The Help, which is about a group of black maids and the young white woman who records their stories, has continued to grow in popularity. The publisher has even postponed publishing the paperback until January 2011.

The most recent APL holds report shows 227 holds for 68 copies of The Help, so while we do have plenty of copies, the demand is still greater. While waiting for your hold to become available, try another well-written novel about the segregated south.

Bombingham by Anthony Grooms
Walter Burke is a soldier in Vietnam who writes a letter to the parents of a fallen soldier explaining the circumstances of his death and recounts his childhood in the sixties. He lived in the hotbed of the civil rights movement in a neighborhood called Titusville near Birmingham, otherwise known as Bombingham.

Four Spirits by Sena Jeter Naslund
Dynamic and instructive novel about the racial injustice, hatred, and horror of Birmingham, AL, circa 1963.

Freshwater Road by Denise Nicholas
Absorbing debut novel follows a young woman South to "trench Mississippi, gutbucket Mississippi" during the summer of 1964 to register blacks to vote.

Mudbound by Hillary Jordan
Story focuses on the Mississippi Delta in the year 1946/47, when returning veterans of WWII knew the world was changing, but their home community did not.

Safe from the Neighbors by Steve Yarbrough
Spellbinding narrative of marital betrayal written against a background James Meredith and the integration of Ole Miss.

Saving CeeCee Honeycutt by Beth Hoffman
An absent father sends his 12-yeard old daughter to Savannah in the 1960s under the care of her never-before-seen Great Aunt Tootie, where a wide assortment of Southern women play a role in CeeCee's healing and coming to terms with her life.

The Summer We Got Saved by Pat Cunningham Devoto
The dawn of integration challenges the Southern small town conventions in Alabama and Tennessee during the 1960s in this thought-provoking novel.

The Wench by Dolen Perkins-Valdez
Like The Help, Wench immerses readers in its characters’ complex emotional lives in this chronicle of the lives of four slave women who are their masters mistresses.