The Calamity Club

A masterpiece of storytelling and a spectacular achievement, this novel does many things: it humanizes women who were willing to do whatever it took to survive in the depressed early-1930s in America; it shines a light on inhumane and misogynistic laws that allowed police to beat, commit to an asylum, and sterilize women who acted in a way those men didn’t like; it shows the pain caused by anti-homosexuality and miscegenation laws; and it shows the force of what can happen when a group of disparate women gather together with a goal in mind, even if it’s just for a short period of time.
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I follow her upstairs to the big girls’ room, where she looks at our old rusty cots, eyes that ugly ceiling. If you stare up at those water stains enough, laying in bed, you will start to see things you don’t want to see. A angry woman’s face saying You’re fired, a runny nasty oyster from a jar, a fat man asking who is respons’ble for letting those puppies die in the freeze. It is a wonder I sleep at all with that going on up there.

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This is primarily about a practical, plucky young woman who takes a trip to visit her well-married younger sister to ask for money right at the moment when the sister's life is about to fall apart. While the elder sister is living in the house of her younger sister and her sister’s mother-in-law, she manages to fall in love, meet an orphan she will later reunite with her birth-mother, and  facilitate a money-making venture that saves lives and ensures a family doesn’t lose their family house.

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The hot metal ladder [that descends into the lake] burns my hands, and I am kicking before I even hit the water. It smells green as it looks here, and when I go under, it feels nothing like pretending in the bathtub. It is more like what I suspect it feels like being borned. A blue-green wet world where everything looks thick and fuzzy and then whoosh, I come up gasping!

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The story is told through the eyes of the two main characters, Meg, the orphan and Birdie, the intelligent and multi-skilled older sister.

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The level of mastery in the writing is stunning. The dynamics between softer, more-emotional sections with tension and discomfort is really well-calibrated. Most of the characters speak some version of colloquial English, which is delightful. And the rhythm with which the story unfolds manages to keep the reader interested through all 635 pages. I stayed up reading this book into the wee hours of many nights, it’s that good. Totally recommended.

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In the Afterword, the author shares some alarming information:
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Another federal law regarding women’s health was passed y Congress in 1918 but feels eerily relevant today. The Chamberlain-Kahn Act, also known as the American Plan, legalized and encouraged police to stop any woman on the street who looked promiscuous. Police were to detain the woman and test her for sexually transmitted diseases. For over half a century, tens of thousands of American women were seized and “forcibly examined,” historian Scott W. Stern writes. “If they misbehaved or if they failed to show ‘proper’ ladylike deference, these women could be beaten, doused with cold water, thrown in solitary confinement—or even sterilized.” According to Stern, the American Plan laws are still on the books, in some altered form, in every state in the nation.

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