Counting Sheep: Calpurnia Tate, Girl Vet

By Jacqueline Kelly, Teagan White and Jennifer L. Meyer

Callie Vee and Travis help animals big and small in this illustrated chapter book series for younger readers.

In this second book in the Calpurnia Tate, Girl Vet series, Callie takes a hands-on approach to animal doctoring. When Callie and Granddaddy go exploring by the river, Callie discovers a leaf covered with spots. Those spots, it turns out, are eggs, and those eggs become butterflies. One of her newly hatched butterflies has a problem, though—its wing is broken. Can Callie find a way to help this butterfly fly?

Mother's prize sheep, Snow White, is pregnant and about to give birth. With Dr. Pritzker off helping a colicky horse, it falls to Callie to deliver the lamb. Will Callie be able to take the situation in hand?

• Language: English
• Publisher: Macmillan Publishers
• Release date: Apr 4, 2017
• ISBN: 9781627798716

Jacqueline Kelly

Jacqueline Kelly won the Newbery Honor for her first book, The Evolution of Calpurnia Tate. She was born in New Zealand and raised in Canada, in the dense rainforests of Vancouver Island. Her family then moved to El Paso, Texas, and Kelly attended college in El Paso, then went on to medical school in Galveston. After practicing medicine for many years, she went to law school at the University of Texas, and after several years of law practice, realized she wanted to write fiction. Her first story was published in the Mississippi Review in 2001. She now makes her home with her husband and various cats and dogs in Austin and Fentress, Texas.

Book preview

1

What I’m going to tell you about took place on our farm in Fentress, Texas, in the early spring of 1901. Now, if you don’t live on a farm, you might not know that spring is the season when most of the animals have their babies, and places like ours were overrun with lambs and calves and piglets and kittens. Most of these babies were born without any trouble, but sometimes things would go wrong. That’s when you’d call Dr. Pritzker for help.

Dr. Pritzker was our town’s animal doctor. (The fancy word for this is veterinarian.) Even though I was only thirteen, Dr. Pritzker and I became friends, and sometimes he’d let me help in his office making labels for the medicines he used. Sometimes—even better—he’d let me read his books, and I learned about the various diseases of livestock. And other times—best of all—he’d let me watch when he doctored the animals. Mother didn’t like this. She thought it wasn’t ladylike or proper, and for some reason she was dead set on me being ladylike and proper. I don’t know why; it didn’t look like much fun to me. So I didn’t usually tell her about it. To be truthful, I almost never told her about it. I figured I was doing her a kindness by sparing her from things that made her unhappy, right?

Right.

Our farmhouse was really big, which was a good thing since it was filled to bursting with Mother and Father and Granddaddy and me and a total of six brothers. Yep, six. And when you’re the only girl, six brothers is far too many. About five too many. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: Life is just not fair