The Calamity Club
Fans of Stockett’s bestseller The Help have waited fifteen years for her next novel, and this long, heartwarming tale of Depression-era sisterhood is well worth the wait. The two narrators are Birdie Calhoun, a principled young woman desperate to help save her family’s Mississippi Delta farm from foreclosure, and Meg Lefleur, an 11-year-old inmate of the Lafayette County Orphan Asylum in Oxford, Mississippi. When Birdie travels to Oxford to ask her well-married younger sister, Frances Tartt, for financial help, she discovers that the genteel home of the Tartt family hides secrets that spell emotional and financial disaster for the sisters. Practical, compassionate Birdie digs in, hoping to help the Tartts escape their own foreclosure, and discovers Meg’s predicament as well – she is a severely neglected “unadoptable” whose mother allegedly abandoned her. When that mother, Charlie, turns up after Meg has already been taken in by a family straight out of a Faulkner novel, she becomes the only hope for both Birdie and Meg when she proposes a new cottage industry for the endangered Tartt mansion – a local home for sex workers catering to the University students of Oxford.
This is the simplest possible summary of a sprawling, hilarious adventure that exposes the cruel intentions behind the upstanding “Anti-Vice” citizens of Oxford and the supportive network of Black and white women who push back against the racist and sexist eugenics laws of the Depression-era South. Stockett manages to do justice to both their desperation and their grit, and presents an astounding number of deeply realized characters in the pages of this novel. Her gift for natural dialogue and her evocation of the comforts of 1930s food, music, and fashions create a satisfyingly immersive experience, and the clever plot will keep the reader turning its many pages eagerly.
