It was 1933 and everyone was falling on hard times. Meg was a young girl of 11-two years ago her single mother went to the grocery store and never returned. After she was found starving in her house she was taken to "Orphan," the Oxford Mississippi Orphanage. The conditions were harsh for the unadopted older girls, the director singled Meg out for abuse, and on her twelfth birthday she would be sent to a cannery to work. She was a bright, intelligent girl, but was not allowed to attend the orphanage school as the director felt that she was too feeble-minded for anything other than being sequestered in a moldy office all day. Her future was grim.
Birdy, a twenty-four-year-old bookkeeper, worked in a general store in a small delta town. She lived with her mother and grandmother, and they barely got by with her salary and a yearly annuity for her deceased father's war service. Birdey was destined to stay home and take care of her family because she was the oldest and too plain to attract a husband, unlike her sister Frances who was beautiful and always putting on airs. Petted and indulged, her looks and charm school education netted her a rich husband in Oxford, and they lived in his mother's house. Frances didn't bother to invite her family to the wedding, and now they haven't heard from her in months. Their mother finally ordered Birdy to visit Frances and ask her for some money to pay the lien on their house, or the bank would foreclose and evict them, as it has been doing to their neighbors.
When Birdy confronted Frances, her sister wasn’t at all pleased. Birdy absolutely didn’t fit into her new lifestyle, and she had no desire to allow Birdy to get in the way of her social climbing, especially when she was this close to getting a position on the senior board of the orphanage. She agreed to ask her husband Rory for the money but only after her birthday, which was a few weeks away. Birdy was bored and Frances figured she could have her sister do some bookkeeping for the orphanage-she could get her out of the house and score some points with the director at the same time. When Birdy worked in the small office, she met Meg and couldn’t understand why the girl had to stay there, and why the director treated her so poorly. A few days after Frances had her birthday, her mother-in-law was robbed of her silver, jewelry and everything of value-and Rory never returned home.
Everyone remembers Stockett’s novel The Help or at least has seen the movie. It has been seventeen years since she wrote that book and this one is well worth the wait. The dual narrated story is totally engrossing, and the over six hundred pages will fly by. I can’t give more away but I can promise that as you join the plucky and enterprising women of the Calamity Club, you will be rooting for them as hard as I was.
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