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The Calamity Club — Can a Novel Be Too Kind to a Cruel History?
The Calamity Club marks Kathryn Stockett’s return to fiction seventeen years after The Help. Set in Depression-era Mississippi, it looks at first like a sprawling, funny and deeply warm story about women, poverty, friendship and survival. But that warmth sits against a historical backdrop of institutionalization, forced labor, eugenics and lives that could be controlled by people convinced they were acting respectably.At the center is eleven-year-old Meg, whose voice gives the novel much of its energy and emotional force. Around her, Stockett builds a large cast of women navigating poverty…
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