"I Dance to My Destiny!": The Penderwicks At Last by Jeanne Birdsall

Lydia believed in dancing wherever she could--on sidewalks, in supermarket aisles, libraries, swimming pools, parking lots. Today her stage was a bench at the bus stop. It was a challenge, dancing on something so narrow, but Lydia took measures to keep from falling--small steps, no leaps, and heavy reliance on upper-body motion.

Even though eleven-year-old Lydia dances for almost any occasion, this is an important moment. Her beloved youngest half-sister Batty is returning from college, worthy of a welcoming dance. But that's not all that inspires Lydia--all of her older Penderwick sisters are coming for the wedding of the eldest, Rosalind, beautiful, twenty-something and brilliant, and to add to Lydia's joy, the wedding is to be held at Arundel, the Berkshires vacation place, the source of many family legends, all of which took place before Lydia was born. Arundel is the family's Camelot, and Lydia can't wait to see the big manor house, the tunnel through the hedge, and the cottage where the original and future Penderwicks spent an epic vacation with the scion of the manor Jeffrey, dodging his epically cross mother, Mrs. Tifton, and making memorable adventures.

And Arundel doesn't disappoint.

Lydia finds an almost instant best friend in Alice, who lives in that very same cottage where the Penderwicks stayed, reads to a sheep named Blossom (in the pasture where a Bull once chased Jeffrey and her sisters) and has a hen called Hatshepsut whose life's goal is to climb to the top of the cottage's staircase. Even the legendary tunnel through the hedge is still there. Instantly Alice and her would-be filmmaker big brother Ben draft Lydia to work on a film in which Alice is to play an alien who dies a dramatic death, and the two girls have adventures dodging Mrs. Tifton. Meanwhile big sisters Jane and Batty take on the task of making gowns for the entire wedding party, Lydia, too.

The magic of Arundel casts its mantle over Lydia as she encounters the stuff of the family stories told of those times before she entered the world, and it is as if the Penderwicks sisters are now all one, as Lydia is finally included in one of their much-recalled MOPS (Meeting of the Penderwick Siblings). It is a moment, wonderful, but somehow bitter sweet as well:

Lydia stopped dancing--struck by a sensation of no longer being here, this night, now. A feeling that she was instead living inside a memory, of a precious place and time, one lost and greatly mourned. As strange as this was, Lydia knew what was happening. Already she was homesick for Arundel, and could hardly bear it.

It is a coming-of-age moment for Lydia as she feels the ribbon of her family's life spinning out, taking her along into the next moment, into their future, her future, too, in Jeanne Birdsall's last book in her National Book Award-winning The Penderwicks series, The Penderwicks at Last (Alfred A Knopf, 2018). An intimate and joyful picture of that family of free-range kids whose magical summer vacation cast a long shadow upon them all, Lydia experiences and understands it at last, as the story of the Penderwick family comes full cycle with a wedding and many promises for them all.

Says School Library Journal, this grand finale provides "a closing image reassuring readers that the Penderwicks, like imagination and adventure, will live forever." And, as Booklist sums it up--"Beautifully crafted, both in descriptions and characterizations, this makes for a fitting end to a much-praised series."

For summer readers who, like Lydia, were not around for the beginning of this popular and notable series, the earlier books are The Penderwicks: A Summer Tale of Four Sisters, Two Rabbits, and a Very Interesting Boy, The Penderwicks on Gardam Street (Penderwicks, Book 2), The Penderwicks at Point Mouette, and The Penderwicks in Spring.