2015 is shaping up to be the year when I am given the privilege to revisit a number of old literary friends. From Albert Camus’ Meursault in Kamel Daoud’s new “The Meursault Investigation” to Harper Lee’s Scout Finch in “Go Set a Watchman” and now, so I recently discovered, Jacqueline Kelly’s Calpurnia Tate in “The Curious World of Calpurnia Tate.”
Calpurnia Tate is the child all naturalists wish they were as children: endlessly curious, possessing of boundless energy, and most important of all, beginning their explorations of the natural world at an age when the mind has not yet been conditioned to repress questions because they might seem silly or pointless to others.