The Evolution of Calpurnia Tate is about a young girl growing up in Texas at the beginning of the 20th century. Callie is the only girl in a large weatlhy family and is expected to learn all the domestic skills necessary to run a big house like the one she is growing up in. However, she likes rambling outside more than learning housekeeping and is the despair of her mother. Her somewhat crusty naturalist grandfather takes an interest in her after she plucks up the courage to talk to him about his work, and they start to bond over collecting specimens and observing nature. Ok, I'm starting to get bored by my description. I'm a little rusty at this. What I really liked about the book and what is missing from my review is Callie's voice. It is all told from her perspective, and I thought she was charming. I particularly liked the scene where she and her best friend take part in their first and last piano recital. Ahhhh vomiting at a piano recital, who hasn't felt like doing that? Anyway, I enjoyed it and hope the author writes another book about Callie and her family.
On to the next book. Like The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society, The Help is totally book club bait. But also like The Guernsey etc etc, I really liked the book. It is told from the perspective of white and black women in the South during the 60s. A wealthy white girl comes home from college without receiving her M.R.S. degree and feels a little like she's a failure for not being married. A black woman works for a young married woman and pretty much raises her daughter, but she has to use a bathroom out in the garage so she doesn't contaminate the family's other bathrooms. Another black woman can't keep her mouth shut and loses almost every job she ever gets. Skeeter, the white girl, sees how her friends treat their black maids and gets the idea to write a book of the maids' stories from their own point of view. At first none of the maids in town want anything to do with this crazy white girl, but they end up doing it. (Well of course they do or there wouldn't be a book, right?) There is a fall out from the book, and it is frequently not good. Of course, it's also not always bad, and that's what I liked. It showed the negative and the positive in the relationships between these women. And let me just say that I will never look at a chocolate pie the same way again. I laughed really really hard about that although it was really really nasty. Read the book and you'll know what I'm talking about.And that is my measly store of good books. Hopefully I'll have a better track record in the next five months.
