Meg Lefleur learned early to stop watching the window. She's eleven, one of the older girls at the Lafayette County Orphan Asylum, the ones nobody chooses, and Stockett introduces her mid-way through a small daily act of self-protection: refusing to hope. It's 1933 in Oxford, Mississippi, the Depression pressing down on everyone, and Meg has decided that wanting things is a luxury a girl like her can't afford. Watching a child make that calculation is the first thing the book does to you, and it sets the temperature for everything that follows.
Then there's Birdie Calhoun, unmarried and loud in a place that punishes a woman for both, who comes to town to ask her socialite sister for help with the struggling family she left behind. What she finds is that her sister's polished life is stitched together out of lies. Birdie is the engine of the novel's comedy. She says the thing everyone is thinking and nobody will risk saying, and Stockett clearly delights in her, handing her lines that land a laugh and a bruise in the same beat. She's the kind of character other characters underestimate exactly once.
The third thread is Charlie, a woman running low on options and lower on luck, and it's Charlie who eventually proposes the scheme that braids all three fates together. I won't say what the plan is. What matters is the sheer nerve of it, and how Stockett uses it to ask what women were actually permitted to do in a time and place where every legitimate door had been bolted from the outside. The book is often very funny, but the comedy runs directly over real danger. One act of defiance in this town, in this year, could cost a woman everything she has and a few things she doesn't.
Stockett writes these three from the inside, in vernacular that never tips over into performance, and she moves among them with the ease of someone who spent years in their company. The Mississippi she builds is textured and lived-in, from the orphanage kitchen where the big girls do the work to the fine parlors where the hypocrisy is thickest and best-dressed. If the plotting sometimes reaches for the large, crowd-pleasing turn, a reveal timed a shade too well or a coincidence that tidies more than real life would, it reads as the generosity of a storyteller who would rather risk sentiment than leave you cold. She wants you fully in it, and mostly you are.
Why you should read
- Readers who loved The Help's Southern voices
- Depression-era historical fiction with heart and grit
- Stories about underestimated women and fierce friendship
- Fans of Fannie Flagg and Delia Owens
What to expect
- Three braided points of view
- Comedy running over genuine danger
- Rich 1933 Mississippi period detail
- A propulsive, crowd-pleasing plot
What holds the whole thing together is friendship, the particular kind that forms between people who have each been counted out in different ways and see it instantly in one another. By the last pages the calamity of the title has been turned inside out and remade into something much closer to a beginning. Stockett has been gone a long while. She came back with a novel that laughs wherever it possibly can, and refuses, flatly, to look away from what it cost these women to laugh at all.
