The Evolution of Calpurnia Tate

I just finished an amazing book called “The Evolution of Calpurnia Tate”. It’s about a girl named Calpurnia Virginia Tate or “Callie Vee”. Callie is a young girl who was fourteen when the first cars were being toured around Austin. She lives with her parents, her six brothers, and her reserved, former captain, grandfather. She is a girl, and on top of that she is her mother’s only daughter so she is expected to become a young woman and sew and cook and knit. As a girl, I personally feel for Callie when she is expected to be a certain person simply because women at the time were not thought as equals to men. The problem is that Callie is not interested or good at the things that she is expected to do. When her grandfather introduces her to the amazing world of science (something she’s never been able to learn in school) she finds that studying science is something that she really wants to do with her life.

The story is really interesting to me because I have so many opportunities open to me that I could never have dreamed about if I was alive in Callie’s time. People were extremely sexist back then and it’s nice to see that society has changed and improved so much since then. One of the things that I like about this book is that it really gives you a chance to see how things worked in a typical family back then. I thought it was really interesting to see all that from this girl’s perspective because it really accents how she was really put below all her brothers for even the simplest of things. For example, every year her family assigns one of the kids to look after the turkeys before thanksgiving because it’s a chore that no one wants, then for Callie’s year she is skipped and the next oldest boy after her has to take care of them. This causes a lot of problems because her little brother is too young to understand that the turkeys are going to die and he tames them and, understandably, gets extremely upset when he finds out that they’re going to be eaten. All of this could have been avoided if her parents had let her do the chore even though it was considered a boy’s chore.

Half of the book is on her relationship with her grandfather and their expeditions to look for plant samples and specimens for the “laboratory” which is really an old shed in the back yard that her grandfather claimed and filled with his artifacts. She is the only one other than her grandfather that ever goes in there because her parents don’t want to bother him and most of her brothers think he’s crazy because he is not very social. But Callie is drawn to this man who seems to have the answer to everything and can actually teach her to find the answers to things that she doesn’t know. I think that if I had a person like that in my family I would want to know everything they had to say about anything. She and her grandfather believe that they have found a new species of this plant called “vetch”. She and her grandfather go through all the stuff to send pictures of the plant to a university to see if they would record it as a new species. At the end it is recorded as a new species and they name the plant after their family.

This is a book that I would recommend to other girls that are actually interested in seeing what it was like for girls like us a long time ago. I think this book has the perfect balance of science history and a real storyline. Calpurnia is a really fun main character because she is really opinionated and you get great perspectives on that kind of life. All in all I just loved this book.