An eleven-year-old girl discovers the wonder of the natural world—and the drive to blaze her own trail—in this Newbery Honor Award–winning historical novel.

The summer of 1899 is hot in Calpurnia’s sleepy Texas town, and there aren’t a lot of good ways to stay cool. Her mother has a new wind machine from town, but Callie might just resort to stealthily cutting off her hair, one sneaky inch at a time. She’s also spending a lot of time at the river with her notoriously cantankerous grandfather, an avid naturalist.

It turns out that every drop of river water is teeming with life—all you have to do is look through a microscope! But as Callie and her grandfather are about to make an amazing discovery, she turns her inquisitive mind toward questions about her own life. Why should a girl living at the turn of the twentieth century do nothing more than cook, clean and sew?

“The most delightful historical novel for tweens in many, many years . . . Callie’s struggles to find a place in the world where she’ll be encouraged in the gawky joys of intellectual curiosity are fresh, funny, and poignant today.” —The New Yorker