A Raucous Tale of Found Family by the Author of ‘The Help’

Kathryn Stockett’s prodigious second novel, “The Calamity Club,” brings together an unlikely group of spinsters, sex workers and orphans in Depression-era Mississippi.

By Lauren Christensen

THE CALAMITY CLUB, by Kathryn Stockett

It all starts with a moldy ceiling in the Lafayette County Orphan Asylum for Girls. It’s the height of the Depression in Oxford, Miss., and the dilapidated house — known around town simply as the Orphan — is filled to the brim with children and babies, waiting to be adopted. Among them is 11-year-old Meg Lefleur, who is banished from the schoolroom by the Orphan’s demonic chairlady and forced to spend most of her waking hours alone in a dank, airless office, wondering why her mother left for the store one day and never came back. Meg was 9.

Enter Birdie Calhoun, the 24-year-old spinster sister of the Orphan’s most butt-kissing socialite-cum-volunteer, Frances Tartt, who married up and out of their Delta hometown and is using her sister’s bookkeeping skills to suck up to the chairlady, Garnett Pittman. (Birdie owes her: Frances has agreed to ask the Tartts for money to pay off the Calhouns’ debts — little realizing that the Tartts will soon fall on their own hard times.) Read the full review at the New York Times.