The Calamity Club by Kathryn Stockett

Gripping, funny, heartbreaking, and hopeful, The Calamity Club marks Kathryn Stockett’s long-awaited return to fiction since her #1 bestselling phenomenon The Help. And friends, it was worth the wait.

The setting: 1933 Mississippi. The Depression is squeezing tight, and three unforgettable women are about to collide.

Eleven-year-old Meg has spent over a year as one of the unadoptable “big” girls at The Orphan in Oxford, ever since her mother vanished one Christmas Eve. Despite the cruelty of the chairlady who runs the place, Meg keeps her wits sharp and her spirit unbroken.

Then there’s Birdie Calhoun, unmarried and unfiltered, who arrives in town to ask her socialite sister for help. But the sister’s grand life, built atop carefully buried Delta roots, is crumbling. Her banker husband is mysteriously absent. Her mother-in-law clings to a vanished world.

When Birdie crosses paths with Charlie, a woman with nothing left to lose, the three women, along with a band of undaunted, disreputable allies, hatch an audacious plan to take back control of their lives. But in a time and place where hypocrisy runs deep and women’s freedom hangs by a thread, the price of rebellion may be calamitous indeed.

Bold, heartwarming, and bracingly funny, this is a novel about female agency, fierce friendship, and the women who refuse to be silenced. The kind of book you’ll want to read on the porch with the salt breeze drifting up from the cove.

Pull up a chair and settle in. You won’t want to put this one down.

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