4.0
The Evolution of Calpurnia Tate
ByPublisher Description
An eleven-year-old girl discovers the wonder of the natural world—and the drive to blaze her own trail—in this Newbery Honor Award–winning historical novel.
The summer of 1899 is hot in Calpurnia’s sleepy Texas town, and there aren’t a lot of good ways to stay cool. Her mother has a new wind machine from town, but Callie might just resort to stealthily cutting off her hair, one sneaky inch at a time. She’s also spending a lot of time at the river with her notoriously cantankerous grandfather, an avid naturalist.
It turns out that every drop of river water is teeming with life—all you have to do is look through a microscope! But as Callie and her grandfather are about to make an amazing discovery, she turns her inquisitive mind toward questions about her own life. Why should a girl living at the turn of the twentieth century do nothing more than cook, clean and sew?
“The most delightful historical novel for tweens in many, many years . . . Callie’s struggles to find a place in the world where she’ll be encouraged in the gawky joys of intellectual curiosity are fresh, funny, and poignant today.” —The New Yorker
The summer of 1899 is hot in Calpurnia’s sleepy Texas town, and there aren’t a lot of good ways to stay cool. Her mother has a new wind machine from town, but Callie might just resort to stealthily cutting off her hair, one sneaky inch at a time. She’s also spending a lot of time at the river with her notoriously cantankerous grandfather, an avid naturalist.
It turns out that every drop of river water is teeming with life—all you have to do is look through a microscope! But as Callie and her grandfather are about to make an amazing discovery, she turns her inquisitive mind toward questions about her own life. Why should a girl living at the turn of the twentieth century do nothing more than cook, clean and sew?
“The most delightful historical novel for tweens in many, many years . . . Callie’s struggles to find a place in the world where she’ll be encouraged in the gawky joys of intellectual curiosity are fresh, funny, and poignant today.” —The New Yorker
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Meet readers like you in the Fable For You feed, designed to build bookish communitiesThe Evolution of Calpurnia Tate Reviews
4.0
“A comforting read & well written. I would say the ending was a little disappointing, I was hoping to see Callie grow up & navigate her dream of becoming a scientist in the 1900s.”
About Jacqueline Kelly
Jacqueline Kelly won the Newbery Honor for The Evolution of Calpurnia Tate, her first book. She was born in New Zealand and raised in Canada, in the dense rainforests of Vancouver Island. Her family then moved to El Paso, Texas, and Kelly attended college in El Paso, then went on to medical school in Galveston. After practicing medicine for many years, she went to law school at the University of Texas, and after several years of law practice, realized she wanted to write fiction. Her first story was published in the Mississippi Review in 2001. She now makes her home with her husband and various cats and dogs in Austin and Fentress, Texas.
Other books by Jacqueline Kelly
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