“As I was writing this book, a curious fact caught my eye. It was regarding a law passed in 1928 that made it legal to sterilize any person in Mississippi deemed an imbecile. The all-male board that decided who qualified for sterilization included in their criteria not only those who were deemed insane, idiots, imbeciles, or epileptics, but also the disabled, alcoholics, prostitutes, and sexually promiscuous women.”
That’s a passage from the Author’s Note of Kathryn Stockett’s novel The Calamity Club. It’s 1933 in Oxford, Mississippi. Eleven-year-old,
intelligent Meg has been in the Lafayette County Orphan Asylum for two years after her mother left her at home on Christmas Eve and never returned. The woman who runs the orphanage makes life for Meg a living hell.
Birdie arrives in town to visit her socialite sister, Frances, and ask for a loan to help out their mother and grandmother. On her volunteering day, Frances brings Birdie to the orphanage to help with accounting, and Birdie meets Meg. And just when it seems that Frances’ husband Rory has agreed to loan the money, he leaves town with most of their valuables and an unpaid mortgage.
Meg’s mother shows up at the orphanage just days after she has been adopted. So, now, Meg’s mother needs money to claim and care for her; Birdie needs money to help her family; and Frances needs money to pay bills and the mortgage. And that’s where the Calamity Club comes in. There’s so much more to this six-hundred-page book.
Stockett is a master at weaving a story, as you might know from her book The Help. It’s also very good as an audiobook. If you love a well-spun story you can get lost in, then you must read The Calamity Club by Kathryn Stockett.
