Who Are The Main Characters In The Calamity Club?

If you only had time to read an introduction to The Calamity Club, I’d introduce you to the characters in the novel. First there’s the 11 year old protagonist, Meg Lefleur who has been written off by the system and is currently living in an orphanage. She’s a really curious and internally complex young girl and I found her really wonderful. Birdie Calhoun is another main character in the novel. She arrives in the town where the story takes place with no intention of staying but she ends up staying and doing loads of work to try to help the other girls who are also living in the orphanage. Birdie is really the center of the novel because she is the connection between the townsfolk and the “orphan girls” that live on the outskirts of town. Her sister Frances is also in the novel and provides a really great contrast to Birdie because although they are sister, they have very different personalities. Frances is a very social and highly decorated young woman and Birdie’s lack of interest in outward appearances and behavior really brings home the social constraints that are placed upon women in this time. Charlie Lefleur is also a main character in the novel. Her past actions have had terrible consequences and she is now struggling with the system as well as her own guilt. Garnett Pittman is the chairlady of the ladies aid in the local church and her treatment of the girls in the novel is some of the most tense and fraught sections of the book. She’s a really great foils to the girls and her seemingly kindly nature hides a mean and harsh heart. I found her really compelling to read. These are the characters that really drive the plot of the novel and the way that they change as a result of each other is really the center of the story. As a reader I found the novel to be a really wonderful mixture of humor, sadness and tenderness and I thought that the characters were really well sketched out. The way that the author has portrayed each of them is really great and I found that I loved some of the characters more than others but that I cared about all of them by the end of the book. It’s a really great read and I found it hard to put down at times. The characters are really complex and multi-layered and I found that I wanted to keep reading in order to find out more about each of them. As I read I kept wanting to talk to my friends about the characters and the way that they interacted with each other. The author has done a great job of bringing the characters to life and I think that this is what makes the novel so great.

The big story in The Calamity Club is its wonderful cast of characters. The main ones to note are the 11-year-old girl from the orphanage Meg Lefleur, who is one of the ‘big girls’. The sensible and outspoken Birdie Calhoun, who comes to town in search of work and becomes the big influence on Meg’s life. The anxious and torn mother of Meg, Charlie Lefleur, whose story and choices run throughout the book. The hard and often difficult Chairlady of the orphanage, Garnett Pittman, who clearly detests the big girls of the home. Lastly, there is Birdie’s very high-society sister Frances, who offers much insight into the class, family and social pressures at play in the book. Reading through reviews of The Calamity Club and the publisher’s blurb for the book, all these characters are mentioned. However, reading through them all, it is clear to see that each of the women and the children in the book have their own particular brand of pain and stubbornness. Author Stockett has done a wonderful job of weaving all of their stories together to create a very messy but extremely human read. I found the main emotional hooks of the book to be the spunky Lefleur girl and the sensible and mischievous Birdie Calhoun, but it was Charlie’s storyline that somehow managed to illustrate the dark historical context of much of the book.

As I looked back through summaries and reviews of The Calamity Club, I realized that the main characters were: Meg Lefleur, the spirited orphan girl at the center of the novel; Birdie Calhoun, a kind and non-descript volunteer at the orphanage who turns out to be a large force in changing things for the girls there; Charlie Lefleur, the mother of Meg, and much of the dramatic plot revolves around her situation and its revelation to her daughter; Garnett Pittman, the manager of the Lafayette County Orphan Asylum, who seems determined to keep the “unadoptable” girls there; and Frances, Birdie’s sister, who is forced to realize the impact of her social ambitions on her family members. Together these characters expose a variety of human failures and successes in that precariously humorous and poignant 1933 Mississippi world, and I can see why The Calamity Club has stayed with me so long.