Once Upon a Spring Break! The Vanderbeekers to the Rescue by Karina Yan Glaser

When her phone rang, Mom weaved through kids, pets and stacks of books. The Vanderbeekers heard her say, "Really?" and "That would be wonderful!"

"That was Perch Magazine!" Mom reported. "They want to feature me and my business in their October issue! There will be a whole magazine spread about my cookies. They're going to send a photographer to the brownstone!"

Mom was going to be a celebrity!

The Vanderbeeker kids' calendar for spring break had already been full, with Isa's violin audition for the community orchestra, constructing Oliver's tree house with Uncle Arthur, and Mom's birthday on Saturday. Now their schedule is interrupted by Mom's interview and the nightly appearance of homeless animals left at their back door--first five tiny kittens, then two guinea pigs, a long-eared dog, and six chickens.

Even the Vanderbeekers, who already have a fat cat named George Washington, a dog named Franz, and a rabbit named Paganini, know they can't keep them all, but when all the animal shelters turn out to be full, the kids put up giveaway flyers all over their neighborhood. There are no takers, but the Vanderbeekers soon receive a fine notice of $450 for unauthorized postings. Trying to get back in her good graces, the kids stay up all night to paint the living room for Mom's big photo shoot, only to discover that what looked like lovely shade of rose at night is a downright scary fuchsia by day.

And then things really get serious, when a grumpy health inspector makes a surprise visit to inspect the premises. Apparently, a Home Processors' License requires a separate kitchen for products for sale and forbids any animals on the premises. An apartment with two dogs, six cats, two guinea pigs and six feather-shedding chickens is way beyond the pale. Mom realizes she's been operating an illegal baking business and sadly drags out her old accounting textbooks to prepare to go back to her former job.

Obviously the Vanderbeeker kids must find a new place for their mother's promising career in the bakery business, not to mention finding homes for their new menagerie. But the upbeat Vanderbeekers take on the job with their usual elan and find a fitting joint solution to both problems in the third volume in Karina Yan Glaser's just-published The Vanderbeekers to the Rescue (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2019). Like her two earlier best-sellers, The Vanderbeekers of 141st Street (1) and The Vanderbeekers and the Hidden Garden (2) (read reviews here) have been hailed for their return to family stories of adventurous and resourceful children in a diverse, but close-knit community where they have free range. Often likened to such family-centric classics as Eleanor Estes' The Moffats, Bevery Cleary's Beezus and Ramona, and Jeanne Birdsall's The Penderwicks,. the Vanderbeekers are like a breath of fresh air among fiction for middle readers, a close bunch of siblings who rely on each other and their neighborhood relationships to make their own way in solving problems. Authentic and charming, these contemporary stories of Isa, Jessie, Oliver, Hyacinth, and Laney are realistic and yet funny, lively and hopeful, and as sweet and satisfying as one of Mom's chocolate sea salt caramel cookies.

Watch for the promised fourth book in this popular series, The Vanderbeekers Lost and Found.

The Secret Garden! The Vanderbeekers and the Hidden Garden by Karen Yan Glaser

Laney's mind was bursting with ideas for the garden. "It's our secret project," Jessie and Oliver coached Laney as they walked back to gather their money so they could head to the garden store.

"Do you think it's okay if we go in there even though Mr. Huxley said not to?" Hyacinth asked.

"Mr. Huxley never specifically said we couldn't," Jessie clarified. "He just said things about liability and not wanting the church to get sued. Look," said Jessie, "if it makes you feel better, I'll write up a liability release form when we get home."

They filed into their brownstone. Mama was on the phone, saying things about "ambulance costs" and "preexisting conditions." Mama gave Jessie money for lunch at Castleman's since she hadn't had time for grocery shopping. Laney couldn't believe the luck! A garden discovery, a trip to the garden store, and now Castleman's!

The Vanderbeeker's summer has not been what they had expected. Jessie's twin Isa is off at music camp, so they are short one Vanderbeeker; Mr. Beiderman, their landlord and reigning grouchy top-floor neighbor, had reverted to being a total recluse and living on cans of Spam, much to their nutrition-obsessed mother's distress; and then Mr. Jeet, their adopted grandfather figure upstairs, had had a stroke. He was very sick, and Miss Josie was staying around the clock at the hospital with him.

So when the Vanderbeekers discover a ivy-covered entry door to a walled plot next to the local church and big brother Oliver cracks the combination on the lock, they decide to turn the weed-and-trash-filled area (complete with abandoned toilet) into a beautiful garden to lift Mr. Jeet's and Miss Josie's spirits when he is discharged from the hospital. Pooling their savings to buy tools and plants, they spend days cleaning up the hidden plot. Oliver recruits his friend Angie, and Hyacinth even enlists the help of Oliver's nemesis, Herman Huckley, with whom she shares a mania for knitting. They discover what seem to be "abandoned" bags of garden soil in a corner their brownstone's backyard, and haul them for blocks to begin planting everything they can afford in their secret garden.

All goes well at first. Mr. Jeet is scheduled for discharge and the plantings are all in and thriving, when Herman's father discovers their secret garden. The Vanderbeekers are dismayed when they learn from Mr. Huxley that the plot has just been sold to make room for an upscale condominium development. Desperate to save their garden, they turn for help to, who else, Mr. Beiderman.

The lively and adventurous Vanderbeekers of South Queens/Harlem are back, in Karen Yan Glaser's second book in series, The Vanderbeekers and the Hidden Garden (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2018). Glaser again portrays a close-knit family and their close urban neighborhood in a summer adventure for the whole clan, as they again show that "It takes a village." In the style of Ramona Quimby's "good sticking-together family" and a neighborhood of friends and sometimes rivals, the Vanderbeekers are a welcome return to the middle-grade family fiction genre of Eleanor Estes' The Moffats, the Quimbys and the Hugginses of Henry and Beezus (Henry Huggins), and Jeanne Birdsall's more contemporary The Penderwicks: A Summer Tale of Four Sisters, Two Rabbits, and a Very Interesting Boy (see review here)--albeit one set in the times of gentrification and smartphones as well as warm cookies, beloved neighbors, and kids who undertake big ideas with a true sense of "agency." As Kirkus Reviews adds, "With refreshing and realistic attention to socio-economics at work, [it is] perfect for individual reading while tucked away in a treehouse or as a family read-aloud."

No Place Like Home: The Vanderbeekers of 141st Street by Karina Yan Glaser

In the middle of a quiet block on 141st Street, inside a brownstone made of deep red shale, the Vanderbeeker family gathered for a family meeting. Papa adjusted his glasses. "You kids know how much Mama and I love you, right?"

Oliver, who was nine years old and wise in the ways of the world, squinted. "Are you guys getting divorced?"

"No, we're--" Papa began. "Is it true?" six-year-old Hyacinth whispered, tears pooling in her round eyes. "Of course, we're--" Mama said.

"What's a dorce?" interrupted Laney, who was four and three quarters. "STOP!" Mama threw up her hands. "Papa and I are not getting a divorce!" Papa stood up. His face was so grim that his ever-present smile creases disappeared. "I didn't see this coming, but Mr. Beiderman's not renewing our lease."

"What's a lease?" asked Laney.

Things have never been great between the lively Vanderbeeker kids and their curmudgeonly landlord. From the moment he'd screamed when the then six-year-old Isa had played her first violin solo, "Twinkle Twinkle" in front of his always closed door, the children knew The Beiderman wished they would leave. It didn't help when their dog Franz used his door for a fire hydrant, or when Oliver hit a baseball through his window and practiced dribbling his basketball loudly on the sidewalk in front of the brownstone. But Hyacinth had learned to walk Franz outside and Isa had practiced violin in the basement for years, and Oliver always played ball at the park now. They had tried hard, but now Beiderman is just a mean old hermit who is ruining Christmas and making them move from the only home they'd ever known.

The kids called their own meeting. They had only eleven days to save their home.

They decided that they would just have to try to win Mr. Beiderman over. But a surprise breakfast, with fresh bread and pastries from Castleman's Bakery, winds up a dropped mess in front of his door when Jessie sees his angry eyeball glaring at her through the peephole.

"Total... failure," she sobs to her siblings.

Hyacinth decides to try a holiday gift, a hand-stitched placemat in Christmasy colors and with Franz on his leash and on his best behavior, she heads upstairs to knock on Beiderman's door.

Hyacinth trembled as she stood before a monster of a man with shaggy, dark hair. His face was pale and lifeless. He was wearing black, black, black. "Leave me alone! Move out of here and let me be!" he bellowed.

The children decide to collect signatures from all their neighborhood friends on a petition to Mr. Beiderman to let them stay in the brownstone. As they talk to the neighbors, they learn that there is a sad story of the tragic loss of his own family behind Mr. Beiderman's seclusion. But when the landlord sees the petition, he angrily calls their parents, who order the kids to apologize to Mr. Beiderman.

Hyacinth picks a little black kitten from the litter mother cat Francesca Priscilla Arlington is raising under the hydrangea bush in the backyard, and wrapping her own rainbow knitted shawl around the kitten and placing him in a box, she steals up to leave the kitten at Beiderman's door, knocks, and races downstairs.

But as it began with Isa and her violin, the feud ends dramatically, with Isa, playing "The Swan" outside Beiderman's door, in Karina Yan Glaser's charming family novel, The Vanderbeekers of 141st Street (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2017).

Each of the Vanderbecker kids is a distinct individual with whom different readers may identify, and their varied, funny, messy, and loving lives, although set in the present, have the nostalgic ambiance of family classics, from that favorite of yesteryear, Five Little Peppers and How They Grew (Dover Children's Classics), to All-of-a-Kind Family to The Moffats and more recently, The Penderwicks: A Summer Tale of Four Sisters, Two Rabbits, and a Very Interesting Boy (see reviews here.) A story of a bitter, lonely man and a family sorrowfully facing the loss of their home, friends, and familiar neighborhood is a great holiday book for middle readers, an affirmation of the importance of an affectionate and tolerant family, a warm home, and a close-knit and caring multicultural community within a big city. Readers are going to be left longing for more stories of the Vanderbeekers from 141st Street.

The Homecoming: The Vandeerbeekers Lost and Found by Karina Yan Glaser

"WHY DO BAD THINGS HAPPEN TO GOOD PEOPLE?" LANEY ASKED.

ISA ROCKED HER BACK AND FORTH. "I DON'T KNOW. IT DOESN'T SEEM RIGHT, DOES IT?"

When big sister Isa discovers clothes neatly folded and hidden in the storage building in the community garden, she realizes someone has been sleeping in the chilly shed, and she names him the P.M., for "Person of Mystery." Isa secretly begins to leave food there every night, but when six-year-old Laney discovers a secret, everyone in their multi-racial, multi-pet family is soon in on it. Then Isa's twin Jessie overhears a conversation between their elderly neighbor, Miss Josie and her great-nephew Orlando, Jessie's special friend. Orlando is explaining that he didn't call Miss Jessie back because his phone suddenly stopped working. Orlando's mother has disappeared again, and Miss Josie tells Orlando his mother wants him to go back Georgia until she returns, unless...

"UNLESS WHAT...?" ORLANDO ASKS.

"UNLESS YOU WANT TO STAY HERE. WITH US. PERMANENTLY."

Now Jessie guesses who the P.M. is, and of course, the Vanderbeeker kids get involved, as they always do. Their parents find out that Orlando's mother stopped paying rent before she left, and Orlando was evicted. Telling no one, he's kept going to school and sleeping in the garden shed. For one thing, Orlando feels responsible to their formerly reclusive upstairs neighbor, Mr. Beiderman, who is training with him to run in the New York Marathon, and to his friends on the cross-country running team, and he really doesn't want to go back to Georgia to live with another great aunt. But when Miss Josie's elderly husband, Mr. Jeet, takes a turn for the worst and dies, things become even more complicated. Miss Josie learns that she cannot be Orlando's guardian because she has only one bedroom in her apartment, and of course the Vanderbeeker's apartment is full, with ten-year-old Oliver sleeping in what is really a large closet as it is.

It all comes to a climax when, on the day of the Marathon, Jessie finds a note from Orlando, saying he's fulfilled his promise to Mr. Beiderman and doesn't want to burden everyone else and has taken the early bus to Georgia. In a flurry of Vanderbeeker activity, word is passed through the runners in the race to Mr. Beiderman, who makes an on-the-spot decision and then a phone call.

"THAT'S MY TRAVEL AGENT! SHE'S GOING TO GET US ON A FLIGHT THAT LEAVES AT THREE THIRTY. OKAY WITH YOU?" HE ASKS JESSIE.

THE VANDERBEEKERS WERE STUNNED. THEIR NEIGHBOR, WHO ONLY A FEW YEARS BEFORE REFUSED TO LEAVE HIS APARTMENT, HAS A TRAVEL AGENT?

Mr. Beiderman and Jessie make their plane to Atlanta just as the cabin doors are about to be closed, and all's well that ends well for Mr. Beiderman, who does have a second bedroom and decides to become Orlando's guardian, and for Miss Josie, and the Vanderbeekers, who welcome their young friend home at last, in Karina Yan Glaser's fourth book in series, The Vanderbeekers Lost and Found (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2020).

And that's just ONE of the plotlines is this latest novel for middle readers from the popular Vanderbeeker series. With a lively family of kids originally ranging in age from five to thirteen, loving parents, and a lively, close-knit urban setting, there's something for a wide range of readers in these upbeat stories of modern family life. (See all reviews here.)

A child once wrote to the beloved children's author Beverly Cleary, sayiing she liked the way her books were "happy-sad," and Karina Yan Glaser's Vanderbeeker stories have that quality, too. And for fans of the Vanderbeeker family, I recommend another series of the adventures of a large family, beginning with The Penderwicks: A Summer Tale of Four Sisters, Two Rabbits, and a Very Interesting Boy.