The Calamity Club

One sentence book review =

Entertaining Harper Lee fan fiction.

Picked up The Calamity Club by Kathryn Stockett (her follow-up effort after The Help) on audio as a suggestion from my daughter as we formed our own ad hoc book club.  We both liked it and we had similar impressions.  I think it added to the storytelling to have this narrated by a female southern dialect voice actor.  That really put me in the story.

It’s a longish listen at 30 hours.  It almost felt like it could have been multiple books.

I liked the writing, the characters and the plot.  It was good storytelling.

The two main characters were funny as hell in their narration and both likeable. They are the ‘plucky female protagonist winning against all odds because they are good by nature’.

As an author, I appreciated the literary asides. The style and narrative morphed as it transited from Faulkner-ish Southern commentary to Fitzgerald-ish Rich-Poor dynamic and through a wonderful, tragic farce.  She even threw James Joyce Ulysses in there to win me over.

Some of the more ‘colorful’ characters were a bit caricature.

Behind the story, as almost another character was the Great Depression.  How it ended the lives of many people and truly brought the country to a standstill. It almost feels like a post-apocalyptic story. After sessions of listening to it I found myself anxious about appreciating my own relative privilege and affluence and not taking it for granted.

And through it all, in the great tradition of Southern authors, were strong women. Some likeable, some ridiculous, some desperate – but all strong.

The author sideswipes the issues of the place and time without being too preachy.  Racism, feminism, elitism, alcohol, same sex dalliances and even eugenics – which apparently was all the rage in the 1930’s US of A.  But she makes her points with the narrative – ‘showing not telling’, as it were.

The only thing that both of us took away as puzzling was how the story seemed to run out of gas and wrap things up in a hurry at the end. Almost as if an editor was threatening deadlines and the author had to find the exit quickly.  It made for some surprising and unexpected plot point resolutions.

All in all a fun listen with a salting of egregious social issues.