The Calamity Club by Kathryn Stockett
My thoughts on The Calamity Club by Kathryn Stockett, the author’s long-awaited follow-up to The Help (2009).
Review of The Calamity Club by Kathryn Stockett
I’m not sure what made me pick up The Calamity Club.
Confession: I tried The Help and hated it. I didn’t get very far, as the phonetic dialogue used in the book drove me crazy and pulled me out of the story. So I DNF’d it, skipped the movie and moved on with my reading life.
Before I read The Calamity Club, I went back and read some of the criticism of The Help, complaints which ranged from characters with white savior syndrome to stereotypes of Black characters (men in particular) to attitudes about race and Southern history that today, seventeen years later, seem very dated. A LOT has happened in the U.S. since 2009, when The Help was published.
But I love to give an author a second chance and in this case I’m glad I did. I think that in The Calamity Club, Stockett creates characters we can’t help but love (or hate) and paints a fully realized historical world for her reader.
I had to smile at the fact that Stockett has Birdie reading As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner, which takes place in Oxford (and also uses phonetic dialogue, which I thought was funny. Well played!)
Stockett sets The Calamity Club in a slightly less politically fraught time than The Help, but a much more economically fraught one.
The Calamity Club is set smack in the middle of the Great Depression, a period that hit the American South particularly hard. In this book, Stockett focuses more on the class structure of Oxford Mississippi (of which gender and race create intersectional identities), the plight of women at the time, and the way the Depression affected the well-off residents in ways that filtered down to the less fortunate.
The book’s main characters are Birdie Calhoun, the unmarried twenty four year-old sister of Frances, who married for money; and Meg LaFleur, a tween who finds herself stuck in an orphanage.
The book’s inciting incident Birdie’s mother sends her on the train to beg Frances for money so that the family doesn’t lose their house. Because she is trying to break into Oxford high society, Frances has distanced herself from her family. Frances also volunteers in the orphanage where Meg is living after her mother didn’t come home one day.
And then, everyone finds out things are MUCH worse than they were expecting and something needs to be done. And, as is often the case, the women have to do it.
The Calamity Club by kathryn stockett had:
- A chatty, conversational alternating first person narrative from Birdie and Meg
- A LONG storyline (at nearly 700 pages, many readers felt the book could have used some trimming)
- Really fantastic main characters in Birdie and Meg
- A great (white) villainess in Garnett Pittman, head of the volunteers at the orphanage, candidate for the president of the Anti-Vice League
- Publication date: May 5 2026 by Spiegel and Grau. Thanks so much to them for the advance review copy.
This book is perfect For:
- Fans of The Four Winds by Kristin Hannah or The Giver of Stars by Jojo Moyes. For a book club pairing (and an Own Voices Black perspective) add I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou or Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston, both of which touch on life in the American South during the depression.
- Readers who don’t mind a long book! But honestly, it didn’t feel like 650 pages!
If you’re looking for other book club fiction, try these:
- Real Americans by Rachel Khong
- Love by the Book by Jessica George
- Park Avenue by Renée Ahdieh
- Notes on Infinity by Austin Taylor
