The Calamity Club by Kathryn Stockett: six stars and a huge crush!

I gave it six stars. Kathryn Stockett, you wrote a masterpiece and I am not sorry for saying it.

Synopsis

In 1933 Oxford, Mississippi, Prohibition is on the wane, and the Great Depression is tightening its grip. Poor and rich folks alike have fallen on hard times, even as the old social order remains. For women on the margins, the options are few and the price of dignity and self-determination is unbearably high.

Eleven-year-old Meg, one of the unadoptable “big girls” at the Lafayette County Orphan Asylum, fights each day to keep her spirit unbowed. Birdie, unmarried and outspoken, has come to Oxford on a mission to ask her social-climbing sister to help the struggling family she’s left behind. And Charlie is a woman with a past, running low on luck but driven by fire, fury, and grit. When their fates converge, they come up with an audacious plan to take back control of their lives. Together, they form an unlikely sisterhood—but in a place and time where hypocrisy is rife, women’s freedom is fragile, and making an enemy can have dire consequences, will the price they pay for their outrageous risk-taking be too high?

The Calamity Club will make you laugh, cry, and cheer—an epic testament to resilience, friendship, and the fierce, funny women who know that calamity can be the spark of new beginnings. This is Kathryn Stockett at her most confident, heartfelt, and hilarious—the triumphant return of one of the most beloved storytellers of our time.

Audiobook review

6 stars
January LaVoy was perfect as usual, and Jenna Lamia did a remarkable impression of a smart, sassy kid.

I can’t decide what I loved most about this book!

Was it the setting? Oxford in the 1920s, brought to life so completely by Kathryn Stockett’s writing that I could see, smell, and hear everything as if I was there. I could feel the heat, see the mold in the tiny stuffy office where Meg had to sit alone for hours, the fairy lights in the back garden of that grand house above the dance floor, the inside of the bank where the fates of so many unlucky citizens hit by the crisis were decided…

Was it the characters?

Young Meg, whose mother disappeared without explanation, who nearly starved before being driven to that orphanage, only to be persecuted by a truly awful woman. I loved her fighting spirit, her survival instincts, her smarts. She was a little girl doing everything she could to get through a terrible situation, so sassy in her own head but weighing every word carefully when speaking to the adults who held her fate and her punishments in their hands. I just wanted to pull her out of that orphanage and give her somewhere safe to grow.

Birdie was also a multi dimensional and exceptional character. Deemed plain, especially compared to her harebrained and egotistical sister Francis, she learned a trade to support her mother and grandmother. Conventional on the surface, but extraordinarily intelligent underneath. Aware of her appearance but also knowing she had a good head on her and lots of courage, Birdie will morph into an entrepreneur alongside Charlie, skirting or going over the law limits and astonishing herself in the process. I loved seeing her growth! She also had a big heart trying to help not only her family but her found family as well and always placing other’s care above her own.

And if those two are the heart of the story, the side characters are crafted with equal care and color.

Ruby with her big mouth, her belligerence, and her surprising insight. Flossy with her false teeth, her sass, and her enormous heart. A woman over forty-five who knew her prospects were limited but oh was she bigger than life itself! Francis, all vanity and self-reflection, whom I wanted to shake repeatedly. Miss Tart, privileged and well-mannered but surprisingly resilient when adversity struck. And Charlie, who had been handed lemons for so long, who had survived unspeakable things, and who fought like a lioness to get her daughter back.

And then there’s Tom, Mr. Benny, and so many others that Kathryn Stockett wrote so vividly I felt I knew every single one of them personally.

Was it the story itself? Women banding together to survive hardship in Mississippi during Prohibition and the Great Depression, fighting to rewrite their destinies and carve out something better?

Or was it the historical layer, rich and unflinching? The segregation of Black people, or at least the open contempt most white people felt for them. The Anti-Vice League targeting women of “low morality,” deeming them feeble-minded and forcing sterilization upon them on the grounds that they would “breed idiots.” The reformation camps for homosexuals. The near-total absence of rights for anyone who wasn’t white, male, and wealthy.

All of it intertwined to weave a splendid tapestry of fates and lives, so richly intricate and carefully researched that it held me captive from the first word to the last.

Bravo, Miss Stockett. You wrote a masterpiece.

Thanks for reading.