Kathryn Stockett has written a huge book about three 20th century Mississippi women who come together despite their differences. No, I’m not talking about “The Help.”

Coming 17 years after that blockbuster, Stockett’s second novel has a lot in common with her first. “The Calamity Club” also is set in her home state, takes place in the past (this time, the 1930s rather than the 1960s) and is about a trio of strangers who create a community with other women. The protagonists are Meg, who is 11 and has lived in an orphanage since her mother disappeared; Birdie, who is 24, a virgin, and always takes care of others instead of herself; and 30ish Charlie, who doesn’t show up for about 200 pages and who launches a business venture with Birdie.

As in “The Help,” men are subsidiary characters in “The Calamity Club,” but their actions define the lives of the women. Meg’s mysterious father has doomed both her and, we eventually learn, Charlie. The men who govern the state have declared Meg “feebleminded,” although her tartly brilliant narrative voice is a constant reminder of what a lie that is. And it’s the departure of Birdie’s brother-in-law Rory (husband of Birdie’s selfish sister Frances) that leads to Birdie, Charlie and a posse of pals turning an ancestral home into something they call a “dance club.” Although not much dancing occurs there.

All three protagonists are compelling, but Meg is the star of “The Calamity Club.” She owes a debt to other smart, lonely girls of Southern literature — especially Frankie, from Carson McCullers’ “The Member of the Wedding” — but her voice is singular and laugh-out-loud funny.

“It must have been a dead scientist or a old Roman who decided each day has the same number of minutes,” Meg says. “Whoever it was, let me tell you, it is not true. By ten in the morning, I would swear a couple years have passed while I been sitting in this office. Lord, I might have turned fourteen just waiting on lunch. By five o’clock, I would not be surprised to look down and see I had grown bosoms.”

Resourceful and optimistic, despite many setbacks, Meg is impossible not to love. Actually, that’s also true of more reserved Birdie, who travels to the mansion her sister shares with her husband and mother-in-law and who reports, in a letter, “Frances’s house has more indoor bathrooms than they have rear ends.”

Those vibrant narrators keep you reading “Calamity Club” even when things flag in the middle of the book, which didn’t need about 100 of its 632 pages, and even when you notice that the Meg/Frankie resemblance isn’t the only borrowing from Southern classics (naming supporting characters Welty and Tartt may be Stockett’s way of acknowledging her debt to predecessors such as Eudora Welty and Donna Tartt, as well as Tennessee Williams).

In the end, the familiarity of “The Calamity Club” works in its favor. We recognize this territory, even if the daring “dance hall” is new — and, as the employees wait for lawmen to cop to what they’re doing, suspenseful — territory.

As in most books with multiple narrators, you’ll probably miss your favorite when they’re not narrating. For my money, there’s not enough Meg in “The Calamity Club.” But Stockett deftly unites her three main characters for an ending that’s as cozy and satisfying as the chicken pot pies her characters keep making and eating.

The Calamity Club

By: Kathryn Stockett.

Publisher: Spiegel & Grau, 632 pages.

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