I have a new favorite heroine in children’s literature. Her name is Calpurnia Virginia Tate, or Callie Vee to her family and friends.  You can meet her in the new book The Evolution of Calpurnia Tate by Jacqueline Kelly.

It is 1899 in Fentress, Texas, and 11 year old Callie Vee is wishing things wouldn’t ever change. She lives with her 6 brothers, mother, father and her mysterious granddaddy, and is happy running through the fields and floating in the river near her home.  She is interested in birds and insects and the natural world, and is surprised to find that her grandfather is a naturalist.  When the town librarian won’t loan her the new book by Charles Darwin. The Origin of Species,  granddaddy gives Callie his copy, and there begins a great friendship between the two.   Chapters also introduce us to Callie’s home life with great descriptions of firefly contests, the coming of the telephone, piano lessons, and a brother who makes a pet of the Thanksgiving turkey.   Gradually Callie realizes that things do change in this year before a brand new century. Her beloved older brother Harry begins courting, a new-fangled invention called the automobile comes to the local fair, and Callie herself begins to be groomed to be a “young lady”.  But she hates knitting and cooking and tatting.  Does she really have to give up her dream of being a scientist?

I would love to introduce Callie Vee to another of my favorite heroines, Lucy Whipple, of The Ballad of Lucy Whipple by Karen Cushman.  Lucy is living in 1849 in the gold rush town of Lucky Diggins, California.  Like Callie, she wonders why everything in life has to change.  :”…Seems I just get used to green leaves when they turn red, just start liking red leaves when they fall. Or I just get used to baby Sierra and she’s up and walking…Why can’t life just stay the way it is?”   “Life changes. That’s the way of it” says her Pa.  “This old Greek fellow  Heraclitus said there is nothing permanent except change, and I reckon he was right.”   Lucy’s life is a lot  harder than Callie Vee’s – she works at her mother’s boarding house and bakes pies, boils sheets to clean them, hunts for food, and puts up with miners looking to strike a fortune.  “I’m sick of them all – dirty boots and dirty sheets, loud voices and big appetites…” But along the way we meet some very funny characters, learn 50 words for liquor and  hear the Ballad of Rattlesnake Jake. And like Callie Vee, Lucy must decide what makes her happiest, and figure out how she can follow her dream.