It has been more than a decade since Kathryn Stockett’s debut, The Help, sold over ten million copies and turned a Mississippi-born first-time novelist into one of the most-talked-about writers of her generation. The Calamity Club by Kathryn Stockett arrives carrying the weight of all those years of anticipation. Set in Oxford, Mississippi in 1933, the novel braids three women’s lives together against the worst stretch of the Great Depression. There is a cussing eleven-year-old orphan, a chinless small-town spinster, and a desperate mother running on fumes. What pulls them together is part survival, part righteous fury, and part scheme that nobody in their right mind would actually try.
Oxford, Mississippi, 1933: A Setting Drawn With Conviction
Stockett knows this place. She grew up in Jackson, and the Oxford of The Calamity Club by Kathryn Stockett feels lived-in rather than researched. The town square has its tinkling bells on drugstore doors. The orphanage has a sign listing every category of girl it refuses to take in, a paragraph that hits like a slap because it sounds completely true to the time. Outside town, cotton fields run up to the porches of rented shacks where eleven-year-old Meg waits for a mother who never comes back. Stockett’s eye for period detail is sharp without ever turning into a Wikipedia entry. Flush toilets, party-line telephones, ladies’ lounges, and Confederate-uniform pilgrimage tours are all there, but they sit inside the story rather than decorating it.
Three Voices, Three Different Heartbreaks
The book rotates through Meg, Birdie, and Charlie, and each woman gets her own vocabulary that says something about her age, education, and disposition. Meg’s chapters are the showpiece. She is eleven, locked in a moldy office at the orphanage by a chairlady named Garnett Pittman, and her sentences run on with misspellings, ain’ts, and the kind of bitter wit a child develops when she has nothing left to lose. She calls the chairlady The Big Phony, gives every adult a nickname based on what is wrong with them, and despite everything still keeps watching the road for her mother.
Birdie is twenty-four, plain by her own description, and has come to Oxford to ask her sister Frances for help. Frances has married into the Tartt family, who from the outside look set for life, but the Tartt house turns out to hold more secrets than money. Birdie’s voice is the sharp-edged comic engine of the novel, full of dry asides and the kind of smart-mouth observations that get a churchgoing girl in trouble. Charlie shows up later, and Stockett uses her sparingly, which is wise. By the time you piece together where Charlie has been and what was done to her, the book has already taught you to take her seriously.
Stockett’s Voice Has Not Lost Its Snap
Her prose, when she settles into it, has the warmth and rhythm of front-porch storytelling. Quick punchlines. Lines you want to read twice. A real ear for how Mississippi women talked in the 1930s. Stockett also handles tonal shifts well. The pages set inside the orphanage are bleak in a way that earns the bleakness, and the moments of tenderness between Meg and the women who try to look out for her never tip into sentimentality. An early scene at a drugstore counter, where Birdie tries to buy a comically large quantity of prophylactics for someone other than herself, is one of the funniest opening chapters I have read in years and tells you more about Stockett’s range than any blurb could.
What the Story Is Really About
Plot-wise, The Calamity Club by Kathryn Stockett is a novel about three broke women who decide to open a roadside establishment that the world can pretend is a dance club. Underneath, the book is doing something more pointed. The villain is not poverty or even the Depression. It is Garnett Pittman, an orphanage chairlady who quotes scripture while pushing for sterilization laws and treating poor mothers as a problem the state needs to manage. Stockett uses Garnett to look squarely at the eugenics movement that ran through American social reform in the early twentieth century, a piece of history most Southern fiction politely skips. The Tartt family subplot, which I will not spoil, takes a quiet, sympathetic look at how a wealthy 1933 family might decide to handle a son who does not fit their expectations. These threads give the book a backbone harder than its breezy opening chapters suggest.
Where the Novel Wobbles
Not every part lands cleanly. The middle stretches a bit. Once the women hatch their plan, the book takes its time getting the operation off the ground, and a few scenes circle back to the same arguments about whether they should do this at all. Frances, Birdie’s sister, is also written so unsympathetically for so long that her later turns feel a touch unearned. And while Stockett handles the racial terrain of 1933 Mississippi with more honesty than some of her critics granted her last time, the Black characters here, particularly the maids Picador and Polly and a quietly memorable woman named Ophelia, are kept further from the camera than the white protagonists. Readers who came away frustrated by similar choices in The Help will likely have similar reservations.
Quick Highlights for the Hurried Reader
- Meg’s voice alone is reason enough to read the book.
- The 1933 Oxford setting is researched without ever feeling precious.
- Garnett Pittman is one of the better villains in recent Southern fiction.
- The pacing sags around the middle third.
- The handling of race is sharper than Stockett’s debut, but readers should still go in clear-eyed.
If You Liked This, Try These
Readers drawn to the Depression-era setting and the women-helping-women plot of The Calamity Club by Kathryn Stockett will find natural follow-ups in:
- The Four Winds by Kristin Hannah. Same decade, Dust Bowl lens, another mother fighting to keep her family alive.
- The Secret Life of Bees by Sue Monk Kidd. A Southern novel about women who close ranks around a hurting child.
- Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Cafe by Fannie Flagg. A similar mix of humor, grit, and small-town friendship in the same part of the country.
- Before We Were Yours by Lisa Wingate. Directly relevant to the orphanage thread and the social policies that produced characters like Garnett Pittman.
- The Help by Kathryn Stockett. Her first novel, set thirty years later in the same state. The Mississippi voice and social fabric clearly belong to the same project.
Final Word
The Calamity Club by Kathryn Stockett is not a perfect book. It is a long, occasionally baggy follow-up from a writer who took a long time to publish a second novel. It is also funny, furious, and full of the kind of women you remember after the lights go out. If you want a story where a sharp-tongued orphan, a churchy spinster, and a worn-out mother decide together that they are done losing, this one is worth your weekend.
