Breakaway Books

Authored by Kathryn Stockett; Published May 2026; Historical Fiction

⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ / 🏖️🏖️

I love a book that I cannot put down, and The Calamity Club certainly had me driving through these 600 pages as fast as I could. It’s not exactly uplifting, but boy did it get me laughing.

In The Calamity Club, during the heart of the Great Depression, Birdie is sent from her small Mississippi town to her sister Frances, who has married a banker, to beg for a loan to help her family survive. But when Birdie arrives, she discovers that Frances’s life is not quite as luxurious as expected—in fact, Frances will also need help to keep her home. At the orphanage in which Frances volunteers is a young girl named Meg, abandoned by her mother and targeted by the orphanage’s owner for poor treatment and a work program. She dreams of being reunited with her mom or just going to school again one day. 

Nearly from the first page, I fell in love with the tone of this book. Birdie and Meg narrate the story in turns, and both of them are just a little bit spunky. Even when awful things are happening to or around them, their pigheadedness and their unique perspective makes for delightfully humorous storytelling. Of course, these two ladies look miraculous in part because they are surrounded by women who are vain, wicked, or just ordinary. Garnett, the woman who runs the orphanage, easily reaches “wicked stepmother” levels of villainy in a way that seems far more fairy tale than historical fiction. She doesn’t come off as a realistic, three-dimensional character, but I can’t say it bothered me too much.

It is quite jarring to read just how impoverished parts of the South became during the Great Depression, and I found myself wanting to shut my eyes to the hunger and pain that the orphans in this novel face. I like to think we treat those who are down on their luck better now than we did then, but truthfully, I’m not sure. Similarly, as Birdie watches women resort to prostitution with little other choice, it struck me over and over that it didn’t have to be this way. (Separately, I did love the community that the prostitutes form in the second half of the novel, even if it seems a touch unrealistic to me.) This novel has a happy ending, but it seems obvious that many, many of the real women from this time period did not. 

The Calamity Club stays afloat with humor despite narrating a story of abject poverty and neglect. I know it sounds depressing, but it is definitely worth a read.