The Calamity Club has been flying off shelves this year, and if you have already turned the last page, you know why — it is the kind of book that makes you want another one immediately. The best books like The Calamity Club share the same bones: women who refuse to be small, a Southern setting old enough to keep its secrets, and a family history that turns out to be bigger and stranger than anyone let on. Here are five more that belong on the same shelf.
5 Books Like The Calamity Club
1. Hymns of Blue Hollow — Kemma MarShall
We will start close to home — this one is ours. Like The Calamity Club, it is a story about women in the South carrying a family through hardship nobody outside the family will ever fully understand. Esther Primm is raising more than she bargained for in a 1940s Appalachian hollow, and the hollow is not always kind about it. Rated 4.5 stars by more than 2,000 readers, and just $4.99 on Kindle. Start reading Hymns of Blue Hollow, meet the characters in the Souls of Blue Hollow, or see the full series in reading order.
2. The Bible of Blackwater County — Jenny Cafaro
Depression-era Appalachia, dressed in scripture and superstition, with a family bending harder every chapter. Cafaro opens with the same instinct The Calamity Club has — a scandal or a dilemma right up front, not scenery — and the Women of Blackwater County series has the same never-alone feeling as Blue Hollow. Find it on Amazon.
3. When the Jessamine Grows — Donna Everhart
Everhart writes the Appalachian South like she has lived every page of it — moonshine, family loyalty, and the particular ache of holding a family together when the ground underneath keeps shifting. If you loved Calamity Club’s stubborn, resourceful women, Everhart’s are cut from the same cloth. Find it on Amazon.
4. Lightning in a Mason Jar — Catherine Mann
A found cookbook, a fifty-year-old secret, and three women who built a shelter for desperate strangers out of their own survival — Mann’s novel has the same multi-generational unraveling that made Calamity Club so hard to put down. Find it on Amazon.
5. Where the Wildflowers Grow — Terah Shelton Harris
A woman running from her past finds an unlikely sanctuary on a flower farm, and slowly — reluctantly — lets herself be found. It is a quieter book than Calamity Club, but it shares the same faith that broken families can still grow something worth keeping. Find it on Amazon.
Where to Start
If The Calamity Club left you hungry for more Southern women who will not go down easy, begin with Book One of Hymns of Blue Hollow. Watch the book trailers in our theater to see the hollow for yourself, and join the Inner Circle below for deleted scenes and first word on new releases.
