Jacqueline Kelly is a new author for me, and I would never have read this book if it had not been on the Caudill list this year.  I was pleased with the book as a whole, but it was a disappointment in many ways and something of a missed opportunity.

The book begins with the summer of an 11-year-old girl living in a small Texas town.  She is the only daughter in a large, prosperous family; her parents own a large plantation and are quite wealthy.  Calpurnia is not interested in the feminine, domestic things that many of her friends find interesting, and a curiosity about Charles Darwin leads her into a close relationship with her retired, reclusive grandfather.  Through the influence of her grandfather, Calpurnia develops as a naturalist, collaborating with her grandfather on his research into the ecology of their surroundings, as well as his attempts to distill fine alcoholic beverages from pecans, a family crop.

As far as conflict goes, Calpurnia struggles to fill the role that her parents, family, and friends (apart from her grandfather) have established for her.  She struggles with her piano lessons, for example, and she has no interest or aptitude for cooking, despite her mother’s attempts at teaching her.  She seems to have a significant interest in science, however, and she pursues this interest to the detriment of her (and her family’s) social standing.

The novel is a careful and intriguing study of the social roles of women in the post-Civil War South, and Calpurnia is an interesting and sympathetic character with real depth.  But there’s just too much missing.  Early in the novel, Calpurnia scandalizes an old librarian by asking for a copy of Darwin’s Origin of Species, and this episode seems to promise more conflict between Calpurnia’s religious milieu and her fascination with Darwin’s concepts of evolution and natural selection.  This conflict is never fully realized, despite the interesting and enormous potential.  Even though the librarian is appalled at the notion of even having a copy of the book and refuses to order the book from another library without an adult’s permission, no one seems to notice or care that Calpurnia reads and studies a copy of the book with her grandfather.  The continuous epigraphs from the book also suggest a closer connection to Darwin than the plot seems to fully realize.

Along the same lines, Calpurnia bumps again and again into the expectations of Southern whiteness without any real consequences.  She wanders into the cotton fields and tries to work on the cotton, but she is brought back to the house by a servant who is shocked – again – at Calpurnia’s choices.  Yet again, there are no consequences for this transgression, and Calpurnia continues her social experimentation in other ways.

This is not intended to be a “potboiler,” so I think it is perhaps unfair to expect Kelly to explore all of the potential conflict implicit in Calpurnia’s wanderings.  The missed opportunities at exploring these things – Calpurnia’s insensitivity to the racism implied in her community, the bitter struggle between science and religion, even the seemingly predatory postmaster who seems a little too interested in touching – end up making Calpurnia seem almost blind to the world she is so intent on observing.

Calpurnia’s evolution, in short, is incomplete.  By the end of the book, it is unclear whether she will be able to adapt and survive.  She greets the new century – 1900 – with warmth and feeling, but her failure to notice the details of the social world around her make this reader wonder if she is really a part of it.