Read-Alikes: The Help

If you liked “The Help” then try…

Baker, Tiffany
Little Giant of Aberdeen County
A spellbindingly woven tale about a girl who grows physically and emotionally beyond her small town's wildest expectations an uprooting of Aberdeen County, and the possibility of love in unexpected places.

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.

Briscoe, Connie
Big Girls Don’t Cry
Naomi Jefferson, who experiences her fair share of loss, betrayal, and addiction, believes that the weight of the world lies on her shoulders, until Joseph, her deceased brother's illegitimate teenage son, enters her life and teaches her a lesson in courage and self-love.

Cantor, Jay
Great Neck
Describes a group of friends, black and white, growing up radical amid the turbulence of the sixties and seventies, following them from their 1960 sixth-grade class in Great Neck to their involvement in civil rights and peace movements.

Cobb, William
Wings of Morning
Set in the small town of Hammond, Ala., in 1965, this Southern drama—the sequel to Cobb's well-received A Walk Through Fire— portrays the intertwining lineages of two families as they struggle against the sins of the past and present.

Conroy, Pat
The Lords of Discipline
Will McLean spends four years at a Carolina military academy where he is responsible for shepherding the first black cadet.

Devoto, Pat Cumnningham
The Summer We Got Saved
Embracing the belief systems of her Southern hometown, Tab witnesses changes in the attitudes throughout the course of a 1960s gubernatorial campaign, which is marked by the establishment of a voting school for church members.

Gaines, Ernest
A Lesson Before Dying
A young illiterate African American man witnesses two black robbers kill a white store owner in Louisiana in the late 1940s, and he is the one convicted.

Grooms, Anthony
Bombingham
A soldier in Vietnam becomes sucked into the Civil Rights movement through a letter written home to the parents of a friend killed in Birmingham's early 1960s wave of racially motivated violence.

Hoffman, Beth
Saving CeeCee Honeycutt
Relegated to the care of an eccentric great-aunt after her mentally unbalanced mother's accidental death, 12-year-old CeeCee is quickly surrounded by the strong women and cultural elements of her new Savannah community.

Hurston, Zora Neale
Their Eyes Were Watching God
Janie Crawford manages to grow and evolve into a heroine for all women in spite of being black and female in the South of the 1930s.

Jackson, Angela
Where I Must Go
A story of young Magdalena Grace, whose narration takes readers through both privilege and privation at the time of the American civil rights movement. The novel moves from the privileged yet racially exclusive atmosphere of the fictional Eden University to the black neighborhoods of a Midwestern city and to ancestral Mississippi.

Jackson, Joshilyn
Gods in Alabama
Ten years after leaving, Arlene Fleet finds she still has not escaped Possett, Alabama, when an old classmate turns up asking questions about a crime Arlene committed in her youth, forcing her into a confrontation with her past.

Johnson, Deborah
The Air Between Us
Racial segregation in a small 1960s Mississippi community is brought into question in the aftermath of an apparent hunting accident, an event that also tests the views of two prominent physicians.

Jordan, Hillary
Mudbound
Recently married, Laura McAllan moves from her refined Memphis home to a struggling farm in Mississippi’s Delta region shortly after World War II.  Faced with primitive conditions and a rocky relationship with her husband, Laura turns to the companionship of her black tenant farmer’s wife.  But with racial tensions at a high point and the arrival of Laura’s unattached brother-in-law from Europe, events are set for a gripping conclusion.

Kidd, Sue Monk
The Secret Life of Bees
After a run-in with Southern racists puts Lily Owens and her beloved caretaker Rosaleen in jeopardy, they flee to South Carolina.  There they meet the remarkable Boatwright sisters, whose skill at beekeeping help Lily come to grips with a family tragedy.

Lee, Harper
To Kill a Mockingbird
The classic Pulitzer-prize winning tale about a young black man who is accused of raping a white girl in Depression-era Alabama.

Lent, Jeffrey
In the Fall
An interracial relationship between a Union soldier from Vermont and a runaway slave at the end of the Civil War initiates a haunting family legacy of war, racism, and secrets that follows three generations from the end of the Civil War to the Great Depression.

Morrison, Toni
Sula
At the heart of Sula is a bond between two women, a friendship whose intensity first sustains, then injures. Sula and Nel are both black, both smart, and both poor. Through their girlhood years, they share everything. All this changes when Sula gets out of the Bottom, the hilltop neighborhood where there hides a fierce resentment at the invisible line that cannot be overstepped.

Naslund, Sena Jeter
Four Spirits
College student Stella Silver has enjoyed a life of privilege, in spite of losing her parents at a young age.  When the bombings at Birmingham open her eyes to the depth of the hate fueling racism, she determines to join the civil rights movement, with memorable consequences.

Neilson, Melany
The Persia Café
The disappearance of a black boy in a small Mississippi town in 1962 plunges young Fannie, who dreams of cooking her way to a better life, into her town's own heart of darkness.

Oates, Joyce Carol
I’ll Take you There
In a novel set in the early 1960s, a young white woman falls in love with a black philosophy student and then must face a person from her past who she believed had died.

Perkins-Valdez, Dolan
Wench
Lizzie has been her master’s mistress for years, bearing his only two offspring and loving him as a husband.  When he takes her to an Ohio resort for Southern men and their black mistresses, Lizzie meets free blacks for the first time, and begins consider her family’s fate if she were free.

Ridley, John
A Conversation with the Mann
Dreaming of making it big in the entertainment world, aspiring black comic Jackie Mann will do anything to achieve his goal as he journeys from Harlem to the height of fame, in a novel set during the early days of the civil rights movement.

Siddons, Anne Rivers
Downtown
Maureen Smoky O'Donnell goes to Atlanta to write for a magazine in the 1960s, and after writing about the city's war on poverty, she falls in love with a man who leaves for Vietnam.

Van Liere, Donna
Angels of Morgan Hill
In 1947, the small town of Morgan Hill, Tennessee, and the lives of its inhabitants are turned upside down by the arrival of the Turners, the area's first black family.