Read The Calamity Club: A Depression-Era Novel That Won't Depress You!

Seventeen years after Kathryn Stockett published The Help, she's released a new novel, The Calamity Club.

The Calamity Club: Kathryn Stockett's 2025 Novel

You may remember Kathryn Stockett's book The Help, published in 2009 by big-house publisher, Penguin. The novel was extremely popular, translated into 35 languages and sold more than 15 million copies globally. The Help became a full-length feature film that earned Octavia Spencer an Oscar.

So you might wonder why it took Stockett so long to write another novel.

Partly because, as successful as The Help was, it was also controversial. The Help focused on the trials of black maids in the South through the eyes of a white woman, and many believed it was an instance of cultural misappropriation. (A much bigger debate for a much different blog.) The uproar wrecked Stockett who was so afraid to write anything controversial that the first drafts of The Calamity Club were boring and bland. To get away from the stress and controversy caused by her massive success, Stockett moved to Bali to continue working. Because it took her so long to write, Putnam, a division of Penguin-Random House, cancelled her contract.

Shortly after, the twelve-year relationship that Stockett thought would last forever, shattered.

But she kept writing even without knowing if her book would get published, moving back to Mississippi from Bali in 2020. Stockett was even able to put some of the "I will survive" tenacity into Birdie Calhoun, one of the main characters in The Calamity Club.

Would you listen to an audiobook that was over 29 hours long?

Length does not indicate the value of a book, and if the story is good, I'm always sorry to see it end whether it's been a hundred pages or five hundred pages. In this case, I enjoyed every minute of the more than twenty-nine hours of The Calamity Club's audiobook. What's not to like? Pathos, plot, and great narration. (I got a lot of gardening, cooking, and cleaning done while listening to the adventures of these Southern women.)

The book is more than 650 pages, weighing 2.2 lbs according to one review, but please don't let that deter you from reading or listening to it.

The plot thickens

Birdie Calhoun, a 24-year-old, strong-minded, unmarried woman from Footely, Mississippi, goes to Oxford, Mississippi to beg her younger sister, Frances, now married into the wealthy Tartt family, for enough money to pay their taxes. The Depression has ground its heels into the working class, and everywhere, homes are being repossessed for taxes and unpaid mortgages, the Calhouns included.

But the plot thickens. (Of course.) Frances is beautiful, but not brainy. She was attracted to Rory Tartt in large part because of the Tartt's family mansion, beautiful possessions, and elevated social standing. Frannie's goal in life is to make it into the accepted upper echelon of Oxford society. She does this by becoming an acolyte of Garnett Pittman, the head of the "charitable" organization, "The Orphan," The Lafayette County Asylum for Orphaned girls.

But Frances delays asking her husband to give her family a loan to pay their taxes because she's not proud of the Calhouns' more humble origins. She puts Birdie off, and to gain more approval with the object of her social aspirations, Garnett Pittman, Frances volunteers her sister's bookkeeping abilities to straighten out the books at "The Orphan" before an inspection.

Birdie, anxious to do something for Frances that would speed the loan for their tax payment along, agrees. It is at the orphanage where Birdie meets the precocious, smart, and extremely mistreated Meg, an eleven-year-old girl who is obviously in Garnett's disfavor and suffers punishments and humiliations the other girls do not.

Meg's plight

It's hard not to love an eleven-year-old underdog character with the self-awareness and charm that Meg exhibits even under horrible duress. She is at The Orphan because one night her mother went to the grocery store and never came back. Meg Meg constantly wonders about what happened to her mother, or whether she was truly abandoned.

Consider the difficulties of the Depression

How do you save your home when you don't pay your mortage or your taxes?

No matter how long you've dealt with a bank, would they ignore the fact that you're defaulting on your payments?

Just how far would you go to save your house? What extremes would you go to in order to save your very own daughter? Would you break the law if it meant rescuing your family?

Stockett says,

“It’s impossible to write about a place like Mississippi, especially in the 1930s, and not talk racism and sexism.”

That being said, it's no surprise that The Calamity Club is filled with social inequities, gender injustices, and class struggles.Bigger cultural movements like Prohibition and Eugenics become part of the conflict. But the novel is also filled with nobility, persistence, and friendship in the most unexpected places with the most unexpected people.

In order for Birdie to save the people she loves, she must resort to behavior that she would NEVER have imagined or condoned in other times, engaging in a desperate kind of entrepreneurism. She and an acquaintance, also in desperate circumstances, devise a plan to rent the Tartt home to "boarders" and open a "Dime Dance Club," employing some very interesting women who come to apply for the jobs Birdie offers.

There is tragedy and sadness in this book for sure. My heart broke for Meg, multiple times. Even flighty Frances got an occasional sympathetic nod from me. There were bankers I hated, matriarchs and a "MeeMaw" I respected, and women who made me laugh and applaud. While I don't know that The Calamity Club is a "masterpiece" of literature with generations of lasting power, it is a rocking-good story, well-told, and every chapter made me want to find out what happened next.

Kathryn Stockett's happy ending

Remember that Kathryn Stockett did not have a publisher for The Calamity Club? Because of the previous controversy, and because few publishers want to take a risk on an author who hasn't produced a book in seventeen years, The Calamity Club was not a sure bet for publication...no matter how many books Stockett sold the first time. She had almost given up hope.

Lucky for Stockett, when she moved back to Mississippi, she began renovating an old home near her friends, Tate Taylor and Sarah Laird, a woman with whom Stockett had worked in the marketing industry decades ago. This was during the Pandemic, and these three families often gathered for dinners and evenings together. Laird volunteered to introduce her friend Julie Grau to Kathryn. Grau was a former editor now in between jobs. A friendship was formed between these two, and over the course of several years, Stockett shared chapters of The Calamity Club with Grau.

Julie Grau was starting to re-envision her longtime publishing house, Spiegel & Grau, an independent publisher. An independent publisher is smaller and more focused than the Big Five publishers. Instead of publishing hundreds of books each year, Spiegel & Grau publishes a select few, focusing all its attention on those books. The Calamity Club is one of them.

What the reviews are saying:

“Stockett’s vibrant follow-up to her bestselling 2009 novel, The Help, traces the intersecting lives of an exasperated older sister, a precocious orphan, and an enterprising woman in 1933 Mississippi. . . . By turns hilarious and heartbreaking, this offers a memorable view into the impossible choices faced by women in the Great Depression.”—Publishers Weekly

“So immersive, exciting, and downright fabulous, you never want it to end.”—Oprah Daily

“Pure, hell-raising entertainment.”—The New York Times Book Review

A few book bloggers said that the novel started slowly, but was well worth it. I have to admit that I did NOT find it slow-going at any point, but I was listening to it instead of reading it, which is a different experience, and the narration was fabulous.

A compelling book braided with great dialogue, social issues, humor, and memorable characters. It may be a book set during the Depression, but it is not a depressing book!

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