You know the child. They come back from outside holding something, and there is already a shoebox in the garage with grass in it.
This is the book for that child. It is the sequel to The Evolution of Calpurnia Tate, set right after it, and the family is the same: Callie, her six brothers, the grandfather with the microscope, the mother who would like everybody to sit down and be normal. What has changed is the subject. The first book is about how a naturalist thinks. This one is about what happens when somebody actually picks the animal up.
Mostly that somebody is Travis, the soft-hearted brother, who keeps bringing home strays and expects them to work out. Callie is the one who has to be honest with him, and with herself, about how that usually goes.
The science it actually teaches
The first book taught natural selection. This one teaches something a nature-loving child needs even more, and almost never gets: the difference between an animal being tame and an animal being domesticated.
A coyote pup raised on a bottle will follow a boy around the yard. That does not make it a dog. Dogs are the product of thousands of years of selection, and a hand-gentled coyote is one animal that has stopped being afraid of you, which is a different thing and often a fatal one. Travis learns this the slow way, over more than one animal, and Kelly does not rescue him from it.
Underneath that is real natural history, animal by animal. An armadillo is not a funny lump. It is a specialist: armored plates, digging claws, a nose built for insects, and a working day that starts at dusk. Once your child knows what an armadillo is actually equipped to do, the idea of keeping one in the yard stops looking charming and starts looking cruel, which is the point.
Then there is the doctoring, and this is the part I would buy the book for. Callie turns toward veterinary work, in 1900, which means no antibiotics, no vaccine shelf, no laboratory. What she has is cleaning, splinting, feeding, warmth, and watching. That last one is the actual skill. You cannot ask an animal where it hurts, so you read posture, gait, appetite, breathing, and whether it is standing in a place it would not normally stand. A child who takes that in has learned how a clinical examination works, and they learned it off a girl in a pinafore.
There is weather in it too. A hurricane comes ashore on the Texas coast in 1900 and reaches this inland family through a relative, and it is worth stopping on, because forecasting barely existed. People read the sky, the wind and the water and made their own call, and a great many of them called it wrong.
The child it lands with
The child who wants to be a vet, and says so, and has said so for two years.
Also the child who is already keeping something alive in a box and needs somebody who is not you to tell them the truth about it. That message goes down far easier from Travis and Callie than from a parent standing in the garage doorway.
It is a good family read-aloud. The chapters are short and episodic, there is real comedy in it, and it does not demand that anyone hold a long plot in their head between sittings.
One place to stop and talk
Stop the first time an animal has to go, and do not soften it. One question: was keeping it good for the animal?
Your child will say yes, because they saw it loved and fed. Push once. An animal that has lost its fear of people will walk up to the wrong person, and there is no way to hand the fear back. That is not a rule about being kind. It is a fact about behavior, and it is why wildlife people say do not feed things.
What to know going in
Read the first book before this one. The store bands both at grades 4 to 7 and they are both fine at that level, but this one assumes you already know the family, the grandfather and where Callie stands with her mother. Handed to a child cold, it is a pleasant book about a lot of people they have not met.
The animals are the sad part. Strays arrive, and they do not all stay, and they do not all live. That is the honest core of the book and also the thing that will land on a soft-hearted nine-year-old. Grief is handled plainly and briefly rather than milked, which is the right way to do it, but it is there more than once.
A relative arrives after a coastal disaster carrying loss, and the losses of 1900 were not gentle ones. It stays mostly off the page. It does not stay out of the book.
Last, it is episodic. There is less shape here than in the first book, more of a run of incidents. Readers who wanted a plot will notice.
Where to get it
This is the sequel, and it reads best with the first book already behind you, so if you are buying only one Calpurnia Tate novel it should not be this one. The Curious World of Calpurnia Tate is $10.99, a dollar more than the book that comes before it, and if your child bounced off that one's slow pace, borrow this from a library before you spend the eleven dollars. We keep it under Stealth Science.
If your child liked this one
Books we have written about that sit close to this one, by reading level and by subject.
A Squirrelly Situation: When a Wild Baby Comes Home
A Squirrelly Situation by Jacqueline Kelly
Grade 4 to 7
Calpurnia Tate: Natural Selection in a Texas Backyard
The Evolution of Calpurnia Tate: (Newbery Honor Book) by Jacqueline Kelly
Grade 4 to 7
The Quest for the Tree Kangaroo: What the Job Costs
The Quest for the Tree Kangaroo: An Expedition to the Cloud Forest of New Guinea by Sy Montgomery
Grade 5 to 8
Ash and Smoke: What a Volcano Actually Drops on You
Journey Through Ash and Smoke (Ranger in Time #5) by Kate Messner
Grade 2 to 5
Browse every book we have written about by age, by kind of book and by subject: Find the right book for your child. Or see the whole Stealth Science shelf.
