Kathryn Stockett made her name writing about women who had to be resourceful because the world gave them no other option. “The Calamity Club,” her long-awaited return, drops us into 1933 Mississippi and asks the same question in harder economic terms: what happens when resourcefulness stops being enough, and the women involved decide to break the law instead?
The novel follows an exasperated older sister, a precocious orphan, and an enterprising newcomer named Charlie, whose lives braid together as the Depression tightens its grip on two families, the Tartts and the Calhouns, both on the verge of losing their homes. When Charlie turns out to be connected to the orphan in ways nobody saw coming, the group lands on a scheme that is equal parts desperate and illegal, one meant to save their houses and reunite a mother with her child in a single stroke. It’s a plot that could tip into farce, and at moments it does, but Stockett keeps a steady hand on the era’s real cruelties underneath the caper: forced sterilization laws aimed at women labeled “feeble-minded,” the casual brutality of orphan asylums, the different penalties men and women paid for the same transgressions.
That tonal balancing act is Stockett’s real skill here. She can write a scene that’s genuinely funny and follow it immediately with one that lands like a gut punch, and the shift never feels cheap because she’s earned both registers through careful, patient character work. Birdie in particular emerges as a fully lived-in creation, brittle and funny and quietly furious in ways that reveal themselves gradually rather than all at once. Readers who loved the voice-driven intimacy of Stockett’s earlier work will recognize it immediately, deepened by two more decades of craft.
The tradeoff is length and pace. At over 600 pages, “The Calamity Club” is a slow burn by design, and Stockett foreshadows so much of what’s coming that the plot’s biggest turns rarely land as surprises. Critics have been largely warm on the book’s heart and its unflinching look at the period’s injustices, praising it as both hilarious and heartbreaking in the way readers have come to expect from Stockett, while several have gently noted that the manuscript could have used a firmer editorial hand — that the emotional payoffs, however earned, arrive after a considerable amount of table-setting. It’s less a criticism of what the book does than a caveat about how long it takes to do it.
If you’re willing to settle in for the long haul, the payoff is real: a novel that treats its Depression-era setting with the specificity and moral seriousness it deserves, without ever losing its sense of humor about the absurd lengths people will go to in order to survive.
Verdict: A big, warm, occasionally overstuffed novel that rewards patience with genuine heart — recommended for readers who don’t mind a slow build toward an earned ending.
As an Amazon Associate, VIRA Broadcasting earns from qualifying purchases.