Fourteen years after The Help parked itself on every book club coffee table in America, Kathryn Stockett has finally come back with another novel set in the same red-dirt corner of the South. The Calamity Club by Kathryn Stockett trades the Jim Crow kitchens of 1962 Jackson for the Depression-era streets of Oxford, but the obsessions are familiar: women who keep each other afloat, the stiff smiles Southern propriety demands, and the way a small town can swallow a girl whole if she steps off the path.
Wild and a little reckless, this one. Funnier than you would expect from a book that touches forced sterilization, baby trafficking, and the casual cruelty of good Christian women. The kind of book that bites a strip out of the very church ladies it impersonates so well.
A Mississippi setup with sharp teeth
It is 1933 and Oxford is hurting. Cotton has cratered to eight cents, the bank is sweating people at supper tables, and the Lafayette County Orphan Asylum has stopped accepting new girls because nobody wants the big ones. Into this town arrives Birdie Calhoun, twenty-four, plain as buttermilk biscuits, sent from her family’s failing farm to ask her socialite sister Frances for help. What she finds at the Tartt mansion is not a charmed life but a closet of unpaid bills and a husband nobody wants to talk about.
Inside the orphanage walls, eleven-year-old Meg Lefleur is waiting for her mother to come back. Two Christmases have passed. She has stopped letting herself hope, mostly. And somewhere out near Mr. Finch’s boardinghouse, a woman named Charlie has come home from a place she should never have been sent.
When the three of them collide, a plan starts forming. It is not a respectable one. Respectability, the book argues over and over, has done more harm in this town than help.
Three voices that earn their pages
Stockett structures the novel around alternating chapters and a few additional narrators. Each one sounds like a real person rather than a literary construction:
- Birdie’s sections read like letters from a smart, frustrated, wallflower-adjacent woman who underestimates herself constantly. She is funny without trying to be.
- Meg’s chapters are the heart of the book. Her voice is uneducated, sharp as broken glass, and so lived-in that you wince when somebody hurts her. Stockett’s choice to drop quotation marks in Meg’s sections gives those chapters a stream-of-thought intimacy that pays off.
- Charlie’s rage. Her grief. Her stubborn, busted-up love for the daughter she lost. She is the engine of the plot.
The supporting cast is where Stockett shows her years of careful watching. Mrs. Tartt, the widow whose money is gone but whose manners refuse to leave. Picador and Polly, the Black women who have worked the house for twenty-six years and miss nothing. Esmeralda, whose backstory deserves an entire novel of its own. And Garnett Pittman, a villain so persuasively rendered you may want to throw the book against a wall.
What lifts the novel
The pleasures of The Calamity Club by Kathryn Stockett are real and plentiful.
- Period detail without showing off. The drugstore scene that opens the book, with its sleigh bells and the small silver tin of Merry Widows, sets the bar early. You can hear the screen door slam.
- A premise that walks a tightrope. The central scheme is risky to write about now, and Stockett does not flinch. She also does not glamorize it.
- Friendship between women that feels hard-won rather than easy. There is bickering, suspicion, and resentment before there is sisterhood, and the warmth lands harder for it.
- Comic timing, especially in the dialogue. Meg’s deadpan and Birdie’s exasperation produce some of the funniest lines you will read in literary fiction this year.
- Real history, handled with care. Georgia Tann’s name appears in the text, and readers familiar with her crimes (or with Lisa Wingate’s Before We Were Yours) will feel the chill instantly. The state hospital storyline draws on the documented horror of Mississippi’s eugenics-era practices. Stockett did her homework.
Where the book strains
A four-star average is honest. The Calamity Club by Kathryn Stockett is generous and big-hearted, but it is not flawless.
- Length. The middle act sags. Once the central enterprise gets running, the narrative settles into a rhythm of new customers, near-misses, and side conversations that, while pleasurable, slow the urgency. A tighter editorial hand might have shaved fifty to seventy pages.
- Coincidence. Several plot turns lean on the small-town logic of everybody is connected to everybody, and one or two of those connections feel a touch convenient.
- Race. Stockett caught real criticism on this front for The Help, and she clearly knows it. Picador, Polly, and Esmeralda are written with more interiority than the maids of her debut, but the book still keeps them mostly in supporting frames. Esmeralda’s storyline in particular is so charged and original that some readers will wish it were the actual center.
- A late-stage emotional resolution that some will call earned and others will call a touch too neat. Reasonable readers can disagree.
None of these knock the novel out. They keep it human-sized.
The prose: looser, ruder, lived-in
If The Help whispered, The Calamity Club by Kathryn Stockett cusses. Stockett’s sentences here are saltier and more relaxed, less concerned with being pretty, more interested in catching the rhythm of how women actually talk when men are not in the room. She trusts her reader. She lets a punchline sit. She knows when to stay quiet and let a scene do its own grieving.
There is a passage near the end, a quiet one set on a back porch with bourbon and bridge cards, that anyone who has loved an aging woman will recognize. It does not announce itself. That is part of its power.
Read it next to
If The Calamity Club by Kathryn Stockett works on you, here is where to head from there:
- The Help by Kathryn Stockett, the obvious starting point and a useful contrast in tone
- Before We Were Yours by Lisa Wingate, the definitive Georgia Tann novel
- The Four Winds by Kristin Hannah, for Depression-era hardship and women refusing to break
- Mudbound by Hillary Jordan, for Mississippi land and Mississippi shadow
- The Secret Life of Bees by Sue Monk Kidd, for found-family Southern fiction with similar warmth
- Where the Crawdads Sing by Delia Owens, if outsider girlhood and Southern setting are what hooked you in
Final word
The Calamity Club by Kathryn Stockett is messier and meaner than her debut, and richer for it. It will sell a million copies, anger a few church ladies, and likely earn its place on next summer’s vacation totes. Readers who came for cozy will find it cozier than they expected in places, sharper in others. Readers who wanted Stockett to grow up some have got their wish.
It was worth the wait. Mostly.