The Penderwicks : An Old-Fashioned Tale

Speaking of old-fashioned stories, as I did in my previous post's review of the movie The Astronaut Farmer, I am reminded of the 2005 National Book Award winner The Penderwicks by Jeanne Birdsall. The subtitle of this book sets the retro tone of the novel : A Summer Tale of Four Sisters, Two Rabbits, and a Very Interesting Boy. Reminiscent of Eleanor Estes' The Moffats or Elisabeth Enright's Gone-Away Lake in style, The Penderwicks tells the story of four sisters whose benevolently disengaged widower father rents a summer cottage tucked into the corner of a large estate and leaves the girls to find their own vacation adventures there.

The sisters are well delineated: Rosalind is the motherly oldest sister who finds herself in the middle of a first crush on the handsome nineteen-year-old gardener Cagney; Skye is the eleven-year-old tomboy firebrand; Jane is the dreamy, literary sister who constantly constructs a narration around their daily doings; and Batty is the shy, animal-loving four-year-old, who has a faithful companion, the family dog named Hound. The plot revolves around their friendship with Jeffrey, the lonely only child of the estate's owner, a fussy, snippetty society matron whose attention is absorbed with her formal gardens and her self-absorbed, social-climbing boyfriend.

The large gardens and grounds of the estate form a wonderful backdrop for the summertime adventures of the sisters and Jeffrey, with secret passages through the hedges, a frog pond to fall into, and the intriguing attic of the main house with its generations of clothing and artifacts to explore. Fortunately for the children, the adults are quite hands-off in their parenting in an old-fashioned way which may seem delightful to modern children used to constant supervision. Major decisions are handled by the sisters themselves through MOOPS (Meetings of Older Penderwick Sisters) and the OAPS (Oldest Available Penderwick Sister).

There are the usual summer adventures--midnight missions through the gardens, rescues of roving rabbits and lost little sisters, bulls chasing the children in the fields, and a convenient tree used for strategic escapes from a bedroom window. When Jeffrey's mother and her fiance' decide to send Jeffrey off to military school, the girls become involved in his plot to run away from home. As expected, all ends well, with Jeffrey's mother listening sympathetically to his own needs and Mr. Penderwick, happily absorbed in his botanical hobbies, gently reprimanding the girls for their intervention in Jeffrey's scheme but celebrating the result.

This is a thoroughly pleasant and refreshing novel about likable and resourceful children in a timeless setting which features none of the trappings or dangers of the current scene. (There is no mention of electronic devices beyond the telephone, and all of the adults are either friendly or at least non-dangerous.) It feels like a book read or a movie seen a generation or two ago, but amazingly was published and honored in this century!

In all, this is a book about which you can honestly say, "What's not to like?"