The Calamity Club

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. Eleven-year-old Meg Lefleur endures a miserable existence at the Lafayette County Orphan Asylum for Girls in Oxford. Singled out by the cruel director, Meg is forced to toil in the institution’s offices rather than attend school. Too old to be adopted, she counts down the days until her 12th birthday, when she’ll be sent to work in a Biloxi cannery—though she still clings to hope that the mother who abandoned her might return. Meanwhile, Birdie Calhoun, 24, is forced into action when back taxes threaten the rural home she shares with her mother and grandmother in the Delta. She travels to Oxford to ask her younger sister, Frances, for help, only to discover that Frances’s supposedly charmed life is far less so than it seems. There, Birdie crosses paths with Meg and Charlie, a down-on-her-luck woman with a wild idea for making a fortune and reclaiming control of her life. The pace slackens at times, but Stockett holds the reader’s attention with her colorful characters. By turns hilarious and heartbreaking, this offers a memorable view into the impossible choices faced by women in the Great Depression. Agent: Kim Schefler, Levine Plotkin. (May)