The Calamity Club by Kathryn Stockett

 Seventeen years have passed since Kathryn Stockett wrote the blockbuster The Help, but she’s back with another book about strong-willed women facing adversity in The Calamity Club released May 5. Setting the story in Oxford, Mississippi, in 1933, she uses this historical fiction to take aim at the atrocities women faced in that time period.

A law passed in 1928 made it legal to sterilize anyone deemed an “imbecile,” which was used to a large part against promiscuous women, all decided by an all-male board. This impacts 11-year-old Meg Lefleur who finds herself placed in an orphanage in Oxford run by a woman worse than Miss Hannigan in “Annie.” Meg has been singled out and is persecuted by the matron who was behind the prosecution of Meg’s mother, a victim of the 1928 state statute.

Birdie Calhoun has arrived from the Delta to visit her socialite sister Frances. Her goal is to ask for money because she and their mother and their grandmother have fallen on hard times like many during the Depression. One of the ways Frances has been working to become part of the inner circle in Oxford is by volunteering at the orphanage.

Frances asks Birdie to use her bookkeeping skills to help prepare for the upcoming audit at the orphanage. Birdie finds the office is also being used for little Meg who has been pulled out of the orphanage’s school program as a punishment for a picture she drew. Birdie clearly sees how Meg is mistreated and befriends the little girl.

All is not as it seems at the antebellum mansion when Frances and her mother-in-law find they are in dire straits when their wealth suddenly disappears due to mismanagement by Rory, Frances’ husband, who has disappeared. Birdie tries to find ways for them to cope with the possibility of losing their home and their belongings.

By happenstance, Birdie runs into Meg’s mother Charlie, a woman who has been victimized by the sterilization law. She, too, is down on her luck with little to lose but now that’s she’s been released from a prison farm, she wants her daughter back.

Putting their heads together, Birdie and Charlie concoct an audacious plan to earn money to help Frances, her mother-in-law, Birdie’s family back home on the Delta, and Charlie and Meg. Elements of the plan are against the law, and if they are caught, the earned money could be taken away. Desperate times, desperate people.

Stockett brings all these threads together in this 638-page story celebrating the strength of women in times of crisis.

 Native Kentuckian Kim Michele Richardson brings the story of Cussy Lovett, the book woman of Troublesome Creek, full circle in this final novel in the Bookwoman series, The Mountains We Call Home.

Coming out in April of 2026, this historical novel set in the 1950s takes Cussy out of the mountains into a most unexpected turn, a prison due to her marriage to a white man as “Blues” were not allowed to marry outside of their own group. Both she and her husband Jackson are imprisoned for their so-called crime.

Prison life is a whole different world for Cussy as she learns to navigate the system, finding her place within its walls as she proves her value as a woman who can keep the books for the kitchen as she makes her case to become the prison librarian. Soon she becomes valuable as a loaner to the men’s prison library as well as to a library outside the penal system that will lead to a path forward for the former packhorse librarian…and her husband.

While the third in the Bookwoman series, this book can be read as a standalone as Richardson provides plenty of background information from the two previous novels. Not only does the author connect the three stories, but she also provides a wealth of information about Kentucky, the way of life there, and some of its historical citizens.

Kim Michele Richardson, best known for The Book Woman of Troublesome Creek which is taught in many high schools and colleges, brings history to life as she is inspired by both the “blue people” of Kentucky and the brave packhorse librarians who contributed to increased literacy levels among those isolated in the hills.

My review will be posted on Goodreads starting January 1, 2026.

I would like to thank Sourcebooks Landmark and NetGalley for providing me with an ARC in return for an objective review.

 

More Than Enough by Anna Quindlen

 In the latest novel from Anna Quindlen, More Than Enough, she tackles dementia, mother-daughter relationships, terminal illness, identity, and infertility. Whatever narrative is active, all these issues play seamlessly in the background.

Polly Goodman is on her second—and highly improved—marriage to a gentle veterinarian who adores her. She loves her career teaching English at a private all-female high school. On the downside slope, her father is in assisted living and fading away, she and her mother struggle in their relationship, her friend is battling cancer, an unknown person reaches out claiming a blood connection through DNA testing, and she and her husband struggle with infertility.

As her father descends into a condition that may force him into a higher level of care, she holds a grudge against her mother for ever placing him into an institution. She has always felt a disconnect in her relationship with her mother.

Even though her friend has had a double mastectomy and is seemingly in good health, the latest tests say otherwise, and Polly finds herself struggling to accept the inevitable. When her friends get her a DNA test kit as a gift, she soon is contacted by a young woman claiming they are closely related even though Polly knows there are no relatives outside of her mother, father, bachelor brother, and an uncle. Who could this mystery person be?

At 42, Polly knows her biological clock is ticking down as she and her husband have gone through endless treatments and procedures without a viable pregnancy. Her students are somewhat surrogate daughters but she yearns for a baby of her own to hold just like her sister-in-law who has two daughters and a newborn son.

Polly is weighed down with the empathy that author Quindlen has trademarked. The story would be a downer if not for the wry humor that Quindlen inserts throughout the story through Polly’s husband, brother, and friends as well as an off-beat trip to an alpaca farm

Anna Quindlen, a novelist and journalist whose work has appeared on fiction, nonfiction, and self-help bestseller lists, won the Pulitzer Prize as a columnist at The New York Times. She lives in Manhattan.

My review will be posted on Goodreads starting November 29, 2025.

I would like to thank Random House and NetGalley for providing me with an ARC in return for an objective review.

 

The First Time I Saw Him by Laura Dave

With The First Time I Saw Him, Laura Dave has written her first sequel featuring Hannah Hall from The Last Thing He Told Me from 2021. While readers welcomed the sequel, turns out it is not quite the sequel they expected with the introduction of two new characters who bog down the narrative. {I really did not care for this one}

Five years have passed since Hannah Hall’s husband and her step-daughter Bailey’s father Owen seemed to drop off the face of the earth. They have moved on, settling in the Los Angeles area. Over these years, they have begun a relationship with Bailey’s grandfather Nicholas, once an attorney for a crime syndicate boss.

During the latest exhibition of Hannah’s art, Owen makes an appearance, though neither she nor he acknowledge one another. She learns later that during the encounter, Owen slipped a flash drive into her pocket. A phone call comes the next day that puts Hannah and Bailey on the run for safety.

The action is interrupted repeatedly with narratives of exchanges between Nicholas and the crime boss, detracting from the way Hannah and Bailey have put into action the run-for-safety plan they developed long ago in case this day came. How can they make it to safety? What chance is there for Owen to reunite with his family.

Laura Dave’s books have been chosen by Reese Witherspoon’s Book Club, Indie Next, Book of the Month Club, The Richard and Judy Book Club, Best of Amazon, and Best of Apple Books. Goodreads readers voted The Last Thing He told Me as Mystery & Thriller of the Year for 2021. That book became a series on Apple TV+. Dave lives in California.

  

Sean Dietrich, affectionately known as “Sean of the South,” delivers a spirited and heartfelt tale with his upcoming novel Over Yonder, due October 7, 2025. Dietrich weaves together a story of redemption and reluctant kinship in the Deep South, all with his signature humor and compassionate warmth.

Defrocked priest Woody Barker is released from prison after 10 years to deal with his troubled past, his heart condition, and his uncertain future. Living on a houseboat moored along the Alabama Gulf Coast, Woody just wants a quiet, peaceful life. But his ex-wife is nagging about his diet and his unhealthy habits as she wants him to be eligible for a heart transplant, and his first ex-wife informs him in a dying request that he has a 17-year-old pregnant daughter named Caroline.

Caroline was born with birth defects stemming from her mother’s drug abuse. She’s been in and out of foster homes all her life. More recently, she had been living with a mean boyfriend who she deserts after he beats her. At her mother’s funeral, she learns Woody is her father.

Forced together by circumstances, Woody and Caroline try to figure out what the purpose is of something Caroline’s mother hid beneath the subfloor of her trailer’s bathroom cabinet. This item plunges them into a dangerous situation with unsavory men following them with a final confrontation. Soon the Federal Bureau of Investigation enters the picture.

Through a series of events, Woody and Caroline forge an unlikely family bond. In addition, she benefits from a grandfather named Major and a younger sister named Rachel.

Southern flavor is infused throughout the book with Dietrich’s dry humor and Southern colloquialisms. Over Yonder is a journey toward reconnection, forgiveness, and the accidental family people choose when the world turns its back on them. This is definitely a book for fans of Rick Bragg.

Sean Dietrich is a columnist, podcaster, speaker, and novelist, known for his commentary on life in the American South. His work has appeared in Southern Living, The Tallahassee Democrat, Good Grit, South Magazine, The Bitter Southerner, Thom Magazine, and The Mobile Press Register. 

Such a Clever Girl by Darby Kane

 Such a Clever Girl by Darby Kane is a gripping domestic thriller. In the prologue, Kane plunges readers into a chilling tableau: the Tanner family of four has vanished—dinner half-eaten, a bloodstain by the door, their bookstore in Sleepy Hollow, New York, on fire. Fifteen years later, the Tanner’s presumed-dead daughter, Aubrey, returns at just the moment an emergency court hearing is taking place regarding the estate of her late grandfather Xavier Tanner, sparking an unlikely alliance of three of the women in the room who hold long-buried secrets.

The courtroom scene is narrated by Stella, a psychologist whose mother Isabel is Xavier’s niece. Marni Richards is an elementary school teacher who suffers with great anxiety. Hanno Sato is the owner of the local coffee shop. In one way or another, each woman has a connection with the Tanners.

The story of what happened on the day the Tanners disappeared is rolled out with  tension-ratcheting momentum as each woman takes the stage briefly in the telling of what happened that day. However, the multiple point of view structure of the thriller with all four women telling the story is a challenge to readers trying to keep track of so many voices.

Aubrey challengers and threatens Stella, Marni, and Hanna with what she knows and what she thinks the role of each woman was on the day the Tanners disappeared. Before the story reaches its conclusions, one of the women will be questioned by the police, another will be caught up in the terror involving a son who has gone missing, and the third will be wrecked by the reveal of all the details about what happened 15 years ago.

Darby Kane is the pseudonym of HelenKay Dimon a former trial attorney and an award-winning romantic suspense author. A native of Pennsylvania, Dimon lives in California.

 

 

Dead Man Blues

 Author Silas House, writing under the pseudonym S.D. House, steps away from his usual Southern story telling to pen the book he has said he wants to read: a murder mystery called Dead Man Blues. Set in the 1950s in the fictional tiny town of Shady Grove on the Kentucky-Tennessee border, Dave Hendricks has fallen about as far as a man can fall: he has lost his wife, his best friend, his job, and his reputation.

Left with only a houseboat to call home and his loyal dog, he works odd jobs in the marina where he rents space for his boat, drinks Jameson, and listens to the blues. A scream across the lake leads him to a fishing camp where someone has been murdered. Once a sheriff for his small town, his investigative instincts kick in as he surveys the murder scene before the current sheriff, his former best friend, arrives.

Even though the sheriff has betrayed Dave, he calls on Dave to help investigate the murder for the good of the community. Dave agrees to work along with, not for, the sheriff to find the killer who slashed and stabbed his victim.

When a second body is discovered—this one floating in Cedar Lake--the townsfolk are fearful of a killer in their community. Dave begins to piece together the puzzle about the two dead men, their connection to each other, and their connection to the community, as he closes in on the murderer.

House said on his Facebook page: “I’ve always wanted to write a murder mystery and now I have, under a slight pseudonym to differentiate this commercial work from my literary writing.”

He is known throughout the South as a quintessential person of letters: a novelist, poet, music journalist, environmental activist, and columnist. He served as the  Poet Laureate of Kentucky from 2023-2024. His trilogy of Clay’s Quilt, A Parchment of Leaves, and The Coal Tattoo are not to be missed by fans of Southern fiction. He lives in Lexington, Kentucky.

 

My review will be posted on Goodreads, Instagram, and Facebook starting August 5, 2025.

I would like to thank Crooked Lane Books and NetGalley for providing me with an ARC in return for an objective review.