Our June Read: The Calamity Club by Kathryn Stockett

By Alex Latte - Cocktail & Book Club in collaboration with Penguin.

This month we are reading The Calamity Club by Kathryn Stockett, and it is a book we have been looking forward to for a long time. It is her first novel in seventeen years, since The Help, and it felt like the right book to bring everyone together around as we head into summer.

The author

If the name Kathryn Stockett is familiar, it is almost certainly because of The Help. She was born and raised in Jackson, Mississippi, and in 2009 she published her debut novel about Black domestic workers and the white writer who set out to tell their stories. It went on to sell more than fifteen million copies(!!) and stayed on the bestseller lists for over two years. In 2011 it was adapted into a film starring Viola Davis, Octavia Spencer and Emma Stone, and Spencer won a well deserved Academy Award for her performance.

The Help was both hugely loved and widely debated, and the questions it raised about who gets to tell which stories have stayed part of the conversation around it. What is harder to argue with is Stockett's talent for writing characters you genuinely care about and stories you want to stay inside. She has spent the seventeen years since then largely away from fiction, which is part of why this new novel feels like such a moment for the people who have been waiting for it.

The Calamity Club

The Calamity Club is set in Oxford, Mississippi, in 1933, with the Great Depression pressing down on everyone, rich and poor alike. The story follows three women whose lives end up tied together.

Meg is an eleven-year-old at the local orphanage, bright and stubborn and determined to keep her spirit intact after her mother failed to come home one Christmas Eve. Birdie arrives in town to ask her socialite sister for help for the struggling family she left behind, and slowly begins to suspect that her sister's comfortable life is built on something far less solid than it appears. Charlie is a woman carrying real loss, pushed to the edge and running low on luck, but full of fight.

Brought together by circumstance, the three of them form an unlikely sisterhood and come up with a bold plan to take back some control over their own lives. It is funny in places and heartbreaking in others, and at its core it is a story about resilience and about women who are underestimated right up until the moment they decide not to be. As Stockett told PEOPLE, the underestimated woman is the one to keep your eye on, and she has spoken about how much the book is really about a woman's right to decide her own future.

Why we chose it

The early response to the book has been lovely. Bonnie Garmus, the author of Lessons in Chemistry, called it a must-read, and The Sunday Times described Stockett as a born storyteller. On the surface it is exactly our kind of book. It is immersive and full of heart, with found family and female friendship at its centre.

There is also a reason this one matters to us beyond the pleasure of reading it. The story is fiction, but the world it is set in was real. In 1933, women had nowhere near the rights they have today, and there were many ways to silence a woman who became inconvenient. One of them was the label of feeble-mindedness, a classification that was genuinely used to lock women away, take their choices from them and decide their lives on their behalf. Kathryn writes about this directly the Author's Note at the end of her book.

At a moment when far-right and authoritarian politics are gaining real ground across the West, a book about women being underestimated, controlled and written off is not simply a story about the past. It is a reminder of how recently this was ordinary life, and of how easily hard-won freedoms can be taken back when people stop paying attention. We would much rather have these conversations honestly and out in the open than pretend the past has nothing left to teach us. Remembering where we have come from is part of making sure we do not end up there again. (!)

Read it with us this June

We would genuinely love for you to read The Calamity Club alongside us this month. There is something special about reading the same book at the same time as a group of other people and then having somewhere real to talk about it afterwards, whether it be our app or in person at our meet up.

Please save the date for Sunday 12th July, when we will be getting together to discuss the book over cocktails and good conversation. More information coming soon.

Our app is launching in the next few weeks, and once it does you will be able to read along with us and order the book directly through us in one place. Until then, the best thing you can do is start reading. You can find The Calamity Club through Penguin to order your copy from your favourite seller, or if want to go the extra step with the club, you can order one of our limited edition boxes in collaboration with Penguin. Order here

Pour yourself something you love, find a comfortable chair, and come and spend some time in 1933 Mississippi with us.

See you inside,

Alex Latte xx