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.