From a Google Image Search
The Calamity Club by Kathryn Stockett may remind you of the movie Risky Business, but her female characters are not teenagers fixing damages to a tchotchke. Their issues are about survival and restoring their agency. Set in the Great Depression, Stockett gives us two parallel story lines that eventually blend into one.
The Great Depression was unkind to everyone, but it was especially unkind to women if they lost a job, or a good stable family life, or their reputation. Kathryn Stockett, who. gave us The Help, likes to write stories where victims win victories, both small and large. She performs this magic again in her story about a group of women at the mercy of a self-righteous woman, powerful men without charitable impulses, and terrible economic times. These women come up with an outrageous and possibly dangerous plan to get the financial security they need to achieve their goals and get out from under the thumbs of their oppressors. Once again, forming an ersatz family operates as a sort of power base.
Meg is a very bright little girl, who is being abused in an orphanage by a woman who believes that women who have children out of wedlock are feeble-minded, that they only produce feeble-minded children, and that, at the very least, they ought to be rendered unable to reproduce. Why did Meg’s mother, who obviously loved her, allow her to end up in the clutches of this hate-filled woman. It’s personal, as you will see.
Two sisters, Frances and Birdie, whose lives become intertwined even though Frances believes she has escaped the low social status of her birth family are unhappily reunited. Their mother and Grandmother are about to lose their home to foreclosure. Birdie comes to borrow money from her lucky sister, only to find that Frances’ situation is not as lucky as Birdie and Frances have been led to believe. Birdie emerges as a person with depth, empathy, and strength.
Isn’t it fun when people do the impossible? At the very least it is satisfying. Read the book.
So Many Books, Choose Wisely 