I tried to read the book The Help by Kathryn Stockett in 2011, and I couldn’t get into it. I didn’t choose The Calamity Club on purpose either. I wanted to try an audio book so I would have something to listen to on long walks – and I randomly chose the first book that popped up on my Audible app. I might note that this is the first time I have “read” an audio book. In written form it’s 640 pages long.
The story plays in Oxford, Mississippi, in 1933, during the height of the Great Depression. Nobody is doing well, and even many rich families are losing everything. The poor can barely survive.
Meg Lefleur was nine years old when she was abandoned by her single mother on Christmas Eve. She was put into the Lafayette County Orphan Asylum for girls where she spent two years being abused. The big girls don’t get adopted very often, so they are neglected until they are twelve, old enough to be shipped off to factories as child slave labor. Eleven years old as the story unfolds, Meg has learned that there is nobody she can rely on and trust but herself.
Birdie Calhoun, at age 24 and unmarried, she is the older of two sisters in a small town in the Mississippi Delta, taking care of her mother and grandmother, living in poverty. She works as a bookkeeper. When times get desperate, she travels to Oxford where her socialite younger sister Francis has married into a banker family. She has the humiliating assignment of asking her sister’s family for money to help them get by.
She find out that everything is not as it seems. The Depression has closed in on her sister’s family and the banking business is not going well. She quickly learns that she appears to be the only one in the family who grasps the severity of the situation they are in – they are about to lose their house to foreclosure. As life around her collapses on all sides, Birdie is the only resourceful person around, trying to remain positive and holding things together.
The entire book is told from the points of view of Meg, the child, how she sees her life, and how she copes with the abuse in the orphanage, and Birdie, the young adult. The two cross paths as Birdie volunteers at the orphanage, and their tenuous friendship ends up with huge implications for both of their lives and the lives of many others they come in contact with.
Almost all the main characters are women. The story deals with racism in the south, segregation, hypocrisy, the abuse of women on all levels, legal, societal, at the workplace, and in the home. It makes life in the 1930ies in the American South come under a spotlight, bright, depressing and often frightening.
As I said above, I didn’t read this book, I HEARED it. And it made an amazing difference. The narrators are January LaVoy, for Birdie, and Jenna Lamia for Meg. Both are extraordinary. They change their voices to a lower octave to simulate the voices of men, they take on accents of the various characters, so you can actually see in your head who is talking by the voice and the accent. Both narrators are doing a phenomenal job in that respect. I wouldn’t want to read this book now, because I’d miss the voices. I want to hear it again.
To top it all off, I didn’t want it to end. It had to end, of course, but there was so much more to experience and live. There were about a dozen people who’d become part of my life that I would like to follow some more. I am already missing them.
This book is a perfect recommendation for my wife’s book club. It does not get any better than this. Only problem, their size limit is about 400 pages, and this, with 640 pages, is a tad above that.
Be that as it may, it gets four stars from me, which means: read this!
