The Calamity Club by Kathryn Stockett
5/5/26; 656 pages
Spiegel & Grau
The Calamity Club by Kathryn Stockett is an exceptional, very highly recommended literary historical domestic drama and women's fiction set in 1933 Oxford, Mississippi, during The Great Depression. The Calamity Club will certainly be one of the best books of the year. With a well-written, compelling, immersive plot that is historically accurate, it will hold your complete attention, which is good because at over 650 pages it is a time commitment to read. This is both Southern fiction and an epic tale of women and a young girl doing whatever it takes to overcome their circumstances during a specific time period when the consequences of their plans could be ruinous or redemptive.
Meg Lefleur, a precocious eleven-year-old "exceptional learner," was abandoned by her mother two years earlier and sent to the Lafayette County Orphan Asylum, or the Orphan, which is run by volunteers in Oxford. Chairlady Garnett has seemingly made it her life's goal to make Meg's life even more miserable than that of the other unadoptable "big girls." Instead of attending school, Garnett forces Meg to stay in a moldering room, alone for the whole day, while Meg counts down the days until she is twelve when she’ll be sent to work in a Biloxi cannery.
Birdie Calhoun, twenty-four, is an unmarried bookkeeper who is the sole support for her mother and grandmother. She has traveled from small Delta town of Footely, to Oxford to ask her sister Frances, who married into the wealthy Tartt family, for some financial help before lose their home due to back taxes. Frances is more interested in courting the society women by volunteering at the Orphan. She talks Birdie into volunteering to do the asylum’s books at the Orphan before the state inspector arrives in a few weeks. Birdie easily does this, while also befriending Meg and taking note of Garnett's innate cruelty and need for control.
It also becomes quite clear that all is not well with the Tartt family and their wealth is an illusion. Frances's husband Rory has been lying. Their lives are suddenly catastrophically changed. At the same time Birdie meets Charlie, Meg's mother, who has a heartbreaking story to tell and just wants her daughter back. She has a daring plan to make money to help all of them, but it's unconventional and defiant.
It has been years since Stockett's The Help (2009) was published so the anticipation for the publication of The Calamity Club has been momentous. The wait was worth the outcome. This is an exceptional, meticulously written novel that held my complete attention for two days. I felt invested in these lives and the outcome for both intricate, and at times, heartbreaking, story lines that eventually result in a dramatic ending. Honestly, this novel was made for a miniseries.
The characters are all fully realized and portrayed as real individuals
with personalities displaying both strengths and weaknesses. They all
memorably come to life in the novel. The time period is also portrayed
with historical accuracy, reflecting the hardship, prejudices and prohibition during the Great Depression. Please take note that a dance hall and house of ill repute is part of one story line if this will bother you.
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