Calliope Callisto Clark and the Search for Wisdom
Written by Claudia Mills
Ages: 9+ | 272 Pages
Publisher: Holiday House (2026) | ISBN-13: 978-0-8234-6050-2
Publisher’s Book Summary: “Difficult” student Callie joins a philosophy club seeking the wisdom she needs to keep her beloved but equally difficult dog in this hilarious, heartfelt middle-grade novel for underdogs and dog-lovers alike!
Once Callie (Calliope Callisto Clark) starts saying something, it’s hard for her to stop. The opinion gets bigger and bigger, her voice gets louder and louder—and she gets in more and more trouble. She’s in trouble with her teacher, who likes order and not Callie. She’s in bigger trouble with her Grampy, who blames Callie and her dog (a.k.a. Best Ever Friend) Archie for his ever-rising blood pressure. Then there’s the biggest trouble of all… just one more strike, and Callie could lose her beloved Archie forever.
When she turns to Greek philosophy for answers on how to solve her problems, she only gets more questions: What is justice? What is fairness? And as her problems get bigger, so do her questions: Is it Callie’s fault when Grampy has a stroke?
Told in Callie’s endearing, energetic voice, Calliope Callisto Clark and the Search for Wisdom is sure to speak to any student who’s ever been called “disruptive.” Acclaimed children’s book author and retired philosophy professor Claudia Mills delivers a heartfelt middle-grade novel for misunderstood readers who feel like they’re living their own Greek tragedies.
A Junior Library Guild Gold Standard Selection
Available on Amazon, Barnes and Noble, and Bookshop.org.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
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Claudia Mills has written over sixty books for children, including The Lost Language, an NCTE Notable Verse Novel, a Charlotte Huck Recommended Book, A Mighty Girl Best Book of the Year, and A Bulletin for the Center of Children’s Books Blue Ribbon Book. Her most recent book, The Last Apple Tree, received a starred review in Kirkus Reviews. She is a recipient of the Kerlan Award for her contribution to children’s literature. She was a professor of philosophy for more than two decades at the University of Colorado. She lives in Boulder, Colorado.
Visit her at claudiamillsauthor.com, Facebook, Bsky Social, and Instagram.
AUTHOR INTERVIEW
Life Is What It's Called - What inspired you to write this novel?
Claudia Mills - For much of my adult life, I have pursued two different careers simultaneously. I was a professor of philosophy at the University of Colorado, and I was the author of many books for young readers. As the years went by, my two careers began to become woven together. I sometimes used children’s literature to illustrate concepts in my philosophy classes; I often had my child characters ponder ethical dilemmas. But I yearned to write a book where my main character would actually encounter some of the great works of the history of philosophy that I have loved for long and try to apply their advice to her own life. This was my inspiration for Calliope Callisto Clark and the Search for Wisdom. But then I had the challenge of making difficult, daunting philosophical texts written over two millennia ago accessible and engaging for young readers. First, I had to give my protagonist an urgent motivation for a new interest in philosophy. I made her an emotionally intense sixth grader being raised by her grandparents, who are threatening to rehome her energetic dog who is causing them as many problems as she is (e.g., a broken wrist for Granny, who trips over Archie while hurrying to the phone for yet another call home from Callie’s teacher). If she’s going to keep Archie, Callis feels she has to be perfect and needs the wisdom of the ages to help her with this impossible goal.
Then, I had to find a way for her to access these texts, which are admittedly hard going even for many college students. Solution: she enlists the sympathetic and philosophically minded school librarian to create a philosophy club where he can give the members needed guidance. I also worked on choosing philosophical questions I thought would be interesting to young readers and would connect with Callie’s struggle to keep Archie. For example (from Plato’s Republic): If you had a ring that would make you invisible, would you do some wrong things you wouldn’t do now? The planning for this book was a complicated jigsaw puzzle with many moving pieces!
Life Is What It's Called - How is this book different from the other books you've written and how is it similar?
Claudia Mills - As I just noted, although I’ve had characters face ethical dilemmas before (e.g., in my middle-grade novel Write This Down, I have aspiring seventh-grade author Autumn wrestle with whether she should publish a story that reveals something painful about her family), this is the first time I’ve had a character actually learn directly from great thinkers of the past like Socrates and Epictetus. I also usually write in third person, but this time Callie’s distinctive, candid, lively voice just came pouring out of me, eager to tell me all about herself! But in all my books, I try to create some scenes that will make readers burst out laughing, and some that will have them blinking back tears.
Life Is What It's Called - What's your favorite line from the book and why?
Claudia Mills - What a fun question! There are a lot of lines I love because they sound so much like Callie and reveal so much of her personality, like this one, early in the book, after she first hears the threat to send Archie back to the Humane Society (it’s a very long line, because Callie is a talker, for sure!): “Even if something happens that is worthy of the world’s biggest and longest meltdown, something that would justify a meltdown entry in the Guinness Book of World Records, it turns out that after you get completely melted, puddle-on-the-floor-melted, little by little the puddle starts to dry up and Melted You starts to turn back into Regular You.” But I’m going to choose the line that for me sums up what the book is fundamentally about. At the end of the book, librarian Mr. Davenport asks the kids in the philosophy club if they’d be open to a new member; they are shocked when they find out who this would be. But then Callie says, “I think . . . I think wisdom sort of belong to everybody?” As the author of Callie’s story, I think wisdom DOES belong to everybody. I wrote the book to share a few bits of the world’s store of wisdom with young readers everywhere.
Life Is What It's Called - How do you think readers will relate to the characters in this book?
Claudia Mills - The three main child characters – Callie, her best friend Peggy, and her nemesis Philip – are very different from one another so readers have a choice of which one they identify with most. Callie has intense, volatile emotions of joy and despair. Peggy is calm and matter-of-fact, taking life as it comes. Philip works so hard to meet high parental expectations that his seeming perfection irks other kids and makes him feel like a misfit at school. This offers a range of possibilities for reader identification.
Readers who have beloved pets – or anything they love deeply – are likely to relate to Callie’s terror of losing her dog if she has one more strike against her. Later in the book, she faces the unthinkable possibility of losing her elderly grandfather to a stroke. The fear of losing what we love, whether large or small, is something many readers, in their own way, will share.
Life Is What It's Called - Why is the messaging in this book important to middle grade readers?
Claudia Mills - The philosopher who features most prominently in the book (and is pictured on the cover) is the great Stoic Epictetus (my own personal favorite!). Epictetus’s central claim is that some things are up to us (our own choices and actions) and other things, everything else, really, is NOT up to us (in particular, OTHER people’s choices and actions). The only thing we need to worry about – the only thing we can do anything about – is the former. The sooner we can learn this crucial life lesson, the better! So this book would help young readers – or readers of any age – who feel burdened by worry about situations that are completely outside of their control (i.e., most of us). I wish I had learned this lesson when I was Callie’s age and need to remind myself of it even now just about every single day!
Life Is What It's Called - What can you tell us about your journey to becoming an author?
Claudia Mills - I wrote my first book, titled MY BOOK, when I was six years old. The entire book consisted of “Nachur Pictures” – rainbow, flower, tree – with one-word labels. But at the end I included advertisements for future books: a “BIG BOOK – 100 PAGES” of “MY LIFE” and a “THICK BOOK – 100 PAGES” – of “POWATREE” (my spelling for POETRY). So, from an early age, I knew what path I wanted my life to take. I continued writing throughout my K-12 school years, including an entire shoebox full of poems scribbled on scraps of paper, church bulletins, and crumpled Kleenex, and a typed-up book (the promised BIG BOOK of 100 pages) about the triumphs and travails of my 8th grade year, a book which was the sensation of the junior high school, with a waiting list for classmates to have a turn to read it.
During my college years I did little creative writing, immersing myself in my philosophy courses instead and then heading off to graduate school in philosophy. But halfway through a Ph.D. program at Princeton (conveniently situated just 50 miles from NYC), I saw an ad in a Sunday New York Times classified section for a position as an editorial secretary at Four Winds Press, a division of Scholastic. On a whim, I applied for it, interviewed for it, was offered the position, and accepted it, bailing on the graduate degree that I did end up finishing over a decade later. My job at Scholastic renewed my love for writing. Each morning, I sat on the bus for my 90-minute commute to the city, busily writing picture books, all of which were rejected with form letters. Yearning for a fly-on-the-wall view that would give me more insight into how my stories were being received, I hit upon the devious scheme of submitting one of my manuscripts to Scholastic under a pseudonym. It, too, was rejected – and I was the one who had to type the rejection letter! Ditto for my second surreptitious submission. But on my third try, the editor I worked for saw some promise in the manuscript and asked me to read it and write up my critique. On my IBM Selectric typewriter I typed a report that was remarkably even-handed: when I put on my editorial hat, I did see many flaws in the book I hadn’t seen before and noted these candidly – as well as the book’s many virtues, of course! The editor ended up writing a letter to the author – me! – which was typed by her secretary – me! – and included the report written by her editorial reader – me! She said she’d be interested in seeing a revised manuscript if I made the suggested changes. Which I did, and she ultimately ended up publishing the book, which had now grown from a picture book into a full-length middle-grade novel. (Fortunately, my timid confession of the author’s actual identity had just made her laugh!)
Many subsequent rejections followed in the decades since then, and many more published books, too. I had started out writing middle-grade novels starring girls who were an awful lot like me. (I have to say Callie is an awful lot like me, too!). But then I married and became the mother of two boys, so I started to write about boy characters who were not at all like me. I branched out from middle-grade to easy readers (my ten-title Gus and Grandpa series) and then to chapter books (such as my recent Franklin School Friends and After-School Superstars series). With The Lost Language (2011), I wrote my first verse novel. So I think, and hope, I’m still continuing to grow as a writer.
Thanks so much for hosting me and giving me the chance to introduce readers to Calliope Callisto Clark and the Search for Wisdom.
GIVEAWAY
Enter for the chance to win one of 10 signed hardcover copies of Calliope Callisto Clark and the Search for Wisdom. One grand-prize winner will receive two additional signed books by Claudia Mills, plus an unforgettable one-hour Zoom visit with the author!
Calliope Callisto Clark and the Search for Wisdom: Book Giveaway
