Spirited Heroines | What to Read to Your Kids

Gift Guide 2018: To Believe…or Not

December 8, 2018 § Leave a comment

This holiday season, I’m running a series of daily mini-posts, each highlighting a different book from 2018 which I love, which has mad gift potential, and which I have not had occasion to write about…yet. A range of ages and interests and formats. Be sure to subscribe with your email address if you want to be guaranteed to see them. Otherwise, take your chances on Facebook (What To Read To Your Kids) or Twitter (@thebookmommy); I kindly implore you to “like” as many posts as you can to increase the chances that others see them.

To believe or not to believe. That’s a question many elementary children struggle with—at least, if mine are any indication—especially around this time of year. Which is why Marc Tyler Nobleman’s Fairy Spell: How Two Girls Convinced the World That Fairies Are Real (Ages 7-10), charmingly illustrated by Eliza Wheeler, is astutely targeted toward these ages. My eight year old, having mostly outgrown her belief in, if not her affection for, fairies, hung on every word of this book the first time we read it together. She has since gone back and re-read it on her own and even asked that I purchase a copy for her classroom. It’s a book which tests your belief in magic on nearly every page. Just when you decide nope, I know this can’t be true, it introduces doubt all over again.

Fairy Spell tells the true story of an ingenious hoax (or was it?) orchestrated by nine-year-old Frances Griffiths and her sixteen-year-old cousin Elsie, during a summer the two spent together in Cottingley, England, in 1917. Sunny days were spent playing and picnicking down by the “beck,” or stream. One afternoon, after Frances fell into the beck and ruined her expensive shoes, the adults in the house were furious. They were even more furious when she told them she and Elsie had been playing with fairies.

The girls intended to hoax their parents, as payback for belittling their belief in fairies, only it ended up going viral—nearly a hundred years before social media—and transfixing the entire world. Of course, the beauty of Nobleman’s telling is that, especially if you haven’t heard the story before (which, presumably, our kids have not), he is careful not to reveal that it actually was a hoax until the end. Even still, he leaves the door slightly ajar as to the possibility that it wasn’t.

To prove their beloved fairies were real, the girls borrowed Frances’s uncle’s camera and took one, then another, black-and-white photographs of themselves down by the beck. When Uncle Arthur developed the pictures, tiny winged creatures could be seen frolicking around the humans. At first, he assumed it was a joke, although he could not figure out how two novices had “faked” such a photograph. Still, if fairies lived on his property, he would have seen them. The girls’ response: “The fairies would not come out for you in a hundred years.” When the girls would not let up, Arthur became downright annoyed and forbid them from using his camera again.

The girls’ mothers, however, “begun to feel that, somehow, the girls were telling the truth.” Two years later, the mothers attended a public lecture on fairies, where they shared the girls’ photographs. After that, news of the photographs began to spread, igniting the interests of academics, photographers, and even Arthur Conan Doyle, “the author who created the world-famous detective Sherlock Holmes.” Nearly everyone had a theory, but many pointed to evidence that the photos had not been doctored. Doyle eventually approached the girls’ families and asked for permission to publish the photographs, albeit under different names to protect the girls’ identities.

The girls returned to Cottingley and took even more photographs, all of which were eventually published in the newspaper, always selling out entire issues in a matter of days. “Everyone was aflutter about the photos.” In the book, the pages of critical analysis that follow—people had ideas, for example, to justify why the waterfall in the background would be blurry when the moving fairies in the foreground were not—are absolutely fascinating and read like one of Doyle’s detective novels. To believe or not to believe.

The truth did not come out until the cousins were near the end of their life, Frances seventy-five and Elsie eighty-one. What the book reveals in its concluding pages about what really went on down at the beck is both astounding and marvelous: astounding because the girls exhibited cleverness well beyond their years, and marvelous because they kept it a secret for so long. (Talk about empowering the child!)

What the story also goes on to illuminate is the real reason the girls protected their secret. They never expected the adults in their lives to fall under their “fairy spell.” When they did, the cousins realized that even adults are hard pressed to give up on the idea of magic…for good.

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Review copy from Clarion Books of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. All opinions are my own. Amazon.com affiliate links support my book-buying habit and contribute to my being able to share more great books with you–although I prefer that we all shop local when we can!

Gift Guide 2018: When We Can’t Go Home

December 6, 2018 § Leave a comment

For the next few weeks (or until I keel over), I’ll be running a series of daily mini-posts, each highlighting a different book from 2018 which I love, which has mad gift potential, and which I have not had occasion to write about…yet. A range of ages and interests and formats. Be sure to subscribe with your email address if you want to be guaranteed to see each one. Otherwise, take your chances on Facebook (What To Read To Your Kids) or Twitter (@thebookmommy); I kindly implore you to “like” as many posts as you can to increase the chances that others see them.

When I was twelve, I was obsessed with Cynthia Voigt’s Homecoming, a novel set in the 1980s about four siblings abandoned by their mother in a mall parking lot. The book follows the children’s physical journey—sleeping in woods, stealing food, battling the elements—to track down their great-aunt and convince her to take them in. Of course, the book is as much about the children’s emotional journey, processing their mother’s betrayal and questioning words like “family” and “home.” To my pre-adolescent self, Voigt’s story seemed like a child’s worst nightmare. But, if watching it play out was terrifying to me, witnessing the children’s resourcefulness and resilience along the way was also deeply consoling. I couldn’t look away.

I was reminded of Dicey and her siblings—of their heartbreak and their fortitude—many times while reading Kate DiCamillo’s Louisiana’s Way Home (Ages 10-13), a middle-grade novel even a reluctant reader won’t be able to put down. While set in the 1970s (not a cell phone in sight), the story has a kind of timeless, floating feel. In its review, Booklist likens it to a fairy tale, with “heroes, helpers, villains, and one princess looking for home.” This “princess”—or anti-princess, as she might more accurately be called—also happens to be one of the most memorable, infectious narrators our children will ever meet.

Louisiana Elefante is abandoned by her grandmother, her only living relation, on an impromptu middle-of-the-night road trip across the Florida-Louisiana state line. Granny begins the trip muttering about “a date with destiny,” about finally breaking a curse she believes has been on their family for generations. “The day of reckoning is at hand,” she cryptically tells her granddaughter. (Louisiana first appeared as a supportive character in DiCamillo’s Raymie Nightingale, although a child need not have read the earlier book to fall in love with this one.)

Louisiana is accustomed to Granny’s eccentricities—one might say affectionately so, which makes the later betrayal all the greater—so while she begrudges not getting clear answers and having to leave behind her friends and her cat, she does her best to stand by the only family she has ever known. When her grandmother succumbs to debilitating tooth pain, twelve-year-old Louisiana even takes the wheel (“you may be surprised to learn I had never driven a car before”), manages to locate a dentist’s office, and then talks her way into getting her grandmother emergency treatment. Louisiana is one calm, cool, and collected kiddo.

Despite Louisiana’s efforts, the road trip goes from bad to worse. After consecutive nights in the “Good Night, Sleep Night” motel, Granny suggests Louisiana find a local singing gig to pay their room and board. When she returns, Louisiana discovers her grandmother is gone, plaid suitcase and all. If that isn’t devastating enough, her grandmother has left a letter. (“Why would you write someone a letter when you were always and forever by their side? You wouldn’t. Unless, of course, you intended not to be by their side anymore.”) The letter not only confirms Granny isn’t coming back, but it reveals a shocking truth about Louisiana’s past. (Nope, I’m not saying any more than that.)

While Louisiana has had to play the adult too many times in her young life, she nevertheless approaches every minute of living with a childlike wonder. It is precisely this duality of personality—at once deeply wounded and unfailingly optimistic—that makes her such an enticing, beguiling character. Even while contemplating the gravity of her situation, Louisiana is distracted by the small wonders around her: a crow on a roof; the brightness of the stars; even the palm-tree curtains which seem out of place in a Georgia motel (“Why weren’t the curtains printed with peaches? That’s what I wanted to know.”). A vending machine is regarded as nothing short of miraculous.

Kate DiCamillo has said of writing this book that, no matter how hard she tried to tell the story in the third person, first person was “the only way the voice would come.” We, too, fall under Louisiana’s spell, continually surprised by the twists and turns in her story, yet always trusting we’re in the hands of a master. The book itself is Louisiana’s own reckoning, her insistence on claiming agency in a world bent on robbing her of it. “I’m going to write it all down, so what happened to me will be known, so that if someone were to stand at their window at night and look up at the stars and think, My goodness, whatever happened to Louisiana Elefante? Where did she go? they will have an answer. They will know. This is what happened.”

What happens is that Louisiana uses her infectious personality, fondness for pineapple upside-down cake, and unparalleled singing voice to befriend a boy named Burke Allen, to enlist the help of a minister and his crotchety organist, and to begin to shape her own destiny, independent of her grandmother and her alleged family history. To find family in the unlikeliest of places. To make a home out of two states. And to begin to forgive those who may have wronged her, but who nevertheless set her on this unique and always-wondrous path.

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Review copy by Candlewick Press. All opinions are my own. Amazon.com affiliate links support my book-buying habit and contribute to my being able to share more great books with you–although I prefer that we all shop local when we can!

Gift Guide: Moon Nibbles

December 4, 2018 § Leave a comment

On the list of books published this year which make me wish my children were little(r), Grace Lin’s A Big Mooncake for Little Star (Ages 2-5) is at the top. How I used to love reading stories about the moon to my kids (like this, this, and this). For our littlest ones, the world outside their windows is big and new and constantly changing. When they tuck inside the crooks of our arms and listen to us read, they’re seeking reassurance as much as understanding. In that vain, perhaps it’s not surprising that the ever-shifting moon is such a popular subject for children’s book creators, representing as it does the mystery, vastness, and allurement of the universe.

A Big Mooncake for Little Star is a captivating juxtaposition of warm and cold, of the intimacy of a mother and child’s bond and the starkness of the universe. Told in remarkably few words, the story begins without any words at all, on the book’s endpapers, where a mama and her daughter are baking a Giant Mooncake. The mama sneaks a peek at her daughter, who perches on a chair, proudly sprinkling sugar (or is it stardust?) into the bowl. (An Author’s Note explains that the Mid-Autumn Moon Festival, the time when these Chinese pastries are traditionally baked and enjoyed, was Lin’s favorite Asian holiday as a child.)

While Mama takes the flat, golden mooncake out of the oven and “laid [it] onto the night sky to cool,” she asks her daughter for something that’s typically in short supply in our little ones: patience. “Now, Little Star…your Mooncake took us a long time to bake, so let’s see if you can make it last awhile. Can you remember not to touch this Big Mooncake until I tell you to?” Little Star has every intention of honoring her mother’s wishes, as she gets ready for bed and falls asleep. But when she awakens in the night, the glint of mischief in her eye can only mean one thing.

For the next several nights, Little Star, with her stuffed bunny as companion, softly pitter-patters out of her bedroom and up to the Big Mooncake, which perches warm and luminous against the jet black sky. “Would her mama notice if she took a tiny nibble?” She takes a bite, “so sweet and tasty.” “Would her mother notice if she took another tiny nibble?”

Then, each night, Little Star flies—crumbs flying off her face like moon dust—back to the warmth of her bed.

Of course, for our little listeners, Little Star’s nighttime snacking is meant to correlate with the phases of the moon. On the last night of the story, Mama goes to look for the Mooncake and all that is left is a “trail of twinkling crumbs.”

What Mama does find is Little Star’s plush bunny, dropped and forgotten during her final nighttime escapade, a sign of Little Star’s blossoming confidence. But just because our young children may flirt with independence, doesn’t mean they’re entirely ready for its consequences. At the story’s conclusion, Mama offers Little Star both her bunny and her forgiveness, and the two share an affectionate moment of reassurance. “Little Star looked up, her grin reflecting her mama’s smile…‘Now let’s go make another one!’”

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Review copy by Little Brown. All opinions are my own. Amazon.com affiliate links support my book-buying habit and contribute to my being able to share more great books with you–although I prefer that we all shop local when we can!

Gift Guide 2018: Neighborhood Superheroes

December 2, 2018 § 2 Comments

To say that Chad Sell’s graphic novel, The Cardboard Kingdom (Ages 7-10), has developed a cult following among my children and their friends might be an understatement. In the week we got it, each of my kids read it five times, conservatively. Then they introduced it to friends on a beach trip, where the book was passed back and forth among all five children every morning on our way to the beach and every afternoon on our way home. A few weeks after we left, my friend texted me a picture of her girls wearing handmade costumes. “They told me you would understand?” she wrote. I needed a little help from my daughter, who didn’t hesitate for a second: “Animal Queen and Big Banshee!”

The Cardboard Kingdom is actually ten overlapping stories, each written in conjunction with a different writer friend of Sell’s and centered around a different child. Together, they paint a picture of a group of neighborhood kids—a refreshingly diverse range of ages, races, and gender identities—who come together during the final week of summer break to explore their alter egos through imaginative play and a whole lot of cardboard. In the vibrant visuals, readers experience both the fantasy playing out in the children’s minds and the reality of what that actually looks like.

As I was thinking about how to sing the praises of this book, I realized I could prattle on about navigating social dynamics and challenging gender norms—or I could let you hear directly from two of the book’s biggest fans. So, I went ahead and interviewed each of my children and have compiled their answers below.

Q. How would you describe what this book is about?

Emily (age 8): It’s about kids in a neighborhood who get to be really good friends because of their imagination, and they go on all these fun and crazy adventures without ever actually leaving their street. Sometimes they fight against each other, like good against evil, but no one actually gets hurt, because it’s only pretend.

JP (age 11): All the different kids in the neighborhood take their personalities and put them into different characters and costumes that are unique to them and super powerful. It’s a story about having fun together and including everyone.

Q. Why do you think you have re-read this book so many times?

Emily: I like how every time you read it, you’re constantly finding parts you missed, especially in the adventures. Reading this book is kind of like what happens when you play with your neighbors: you can’t stop.

Q. What do you think about the pictures in the book?

Emily: They’re really good. They show what the kids are feeling without describing it.

Q. Can you think of any messages that come through in the book?

Emily: That you can always find good in people who are mean. There’s a chapter called “The Bully,” where a boy thinks the other kids are being stupid, so he tears up their creations to make them feel bad. But then when he leaves, he gets bullied by other kids, so he comes back to the [earlier] kids and joins forces with them, because now he knows what it feels like to be bullied.

JP: The book encourages you to use your imagination and to include everyone when you play.

Emily: No matter what problems are going on in your life, you can always find a way to have fun.

Q. In addition to including people, I might add that it’s also about learning to accept people for who they are—and encouraging them to accept themselves. Why is this a struggle for some of the kids?

JP: Some of the kids struggle to make friends. One of the kids is really loud and no one likes it, but when she puts that loudness into her character, it kind of works. Another kid is a boy who likes dressing up as a girl. His character is Sorceress. His parents don’t really like it; they don’t understand why he wants to be a girl. But the other kids don’t act like it’s a big deal, because he’s actually a really good sorceress.

[I have to add: I absolutely love the Sorceress storyline, especially when the boy’s mother finally sits him down to try to understand his interest. “Is it really just dress-up and make-believe?” she asks. “Who is the sorceress?” And the boy responds, “She’s what I want to be…magical and powerful and amazing.”]

Q. Why do you think parents should get this book for their children?

Emily: Because it’s one of the best books I’ve ever read, and I’ve read a lot of books. And because it will make them think about how other people are feeling, especially the other kids on your street, when you are all playing together.

JP: Because it’s about all different kinds of kids, and there’s no discrimination, and it sets a good example about being inclusive. Also, it’s really fun.

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Book published by Random House. All opinions are my own. Amazon.com affiliate links support my book-buying habit and contribute to my being able to share more great books with you–although I prefer that we all shop local when we can!

Gift Guide 2018: Hanukkah in Good Company

December 1, 2018 § 5 Comments

Our family doesn’t celebrate Hanukkah, and I’m by no means an authority on Jewish children’s literature (I recommend this excellent source). That said, I could be considered something of an authority on Sydney Taylor’s All-of-a-Kind Family books, published in the 1950s and featuring a Jewish immigrant family with five daughters living in New York City’s Lower East Side at the turn of the century. As a child, I could not get enough of these books. As a parent, I listened to all of them in the car with my kids and…yup, just as wonderful.

If you heard a squeal echoing across the universe over Thanksgiving break, it was because I wandered into Books of Wonder in New York and discovered there is a now a picture book based on Taylor’s classic chapter books. Written by Emily Jenkins and illustrated by Paul O. Zelinsky (both of whom will forever have my heart because of these), All-of-a-Kind Family Hanukkah (Ages 3-7) does the seemingly impossible: it perfectly channels the old-fashioned warmth of the original books, then adds visuals so fitting, they may well have been there all along. It’s like going to see the movie of a favorite book and having it match exactly what’s in your head.

The five sisters—Ella, Henny, Sarah, Charlotte, and Gertie—range in age from twelve to four; and no finer example of sibling affection will you find. But, because reading about perfect children is supremely dull, the gift of Taylor’s original books has always lain in the not-so-perfect moments, the times when the girls grow grumpy and irritable and don’t want to be models of helpfulness and patience. All-of-a-Kind Family Hanukkah is filled with just such moments, from Henny giving Gertie the side eye on the cover, to Gertie’s full-fledged temper tantrum halfway through the story.

It’s the first night of Hanukkah, and Gertie is tired of her older sisters prattling on about all the things that will happen when Papa gets home: lighting the menorah, saying the blessings in Hebrew, etc. As if she doesn’t know! She may be the youngest, but she knows about latkes, thank you very much (she just doesn’t remember how they taste). Even more, Gertie is tired of her sisters and mother keeping her from helping prepare holiday feasts. Why must the potato peeler always be too sharp for her?

We can hardly blame Gertie for feeling left out of such collaboration and festivity. Plus, the taste and smells evoked are every bit as mouth-watering as they are in the original books, from the “salty” chicken to the “sweet” applesauce to the “crispy” potatoes.

When Gertie explodes, her mother takes her by the hand lovingly but firmly and leads her upstairs for a time out. Gertie (I swear, I’ve no idea what kind of girl would do this) decides she will hide under a bed. She’ll show them. “They will miss her when they can’t find her./ Mama will be sorry she didn’t let Gertie help.” To heck with the singing and laughing going on downstairs. She is going to stay. under. the. bed. forever. (I swear, I have no idea what kind of girl would do this.)

Fans of Sydney Taylor know that, while Mama plays the disciplinarian, Papa has just the touch to mend the hurt. It’s Papa who finally entices Gertie out from under the bed with a handkerchief of gingersnaps. Papa who finds for Gertie, not just any job, but the most important job of all: “Tell me. Are you old enough to light the menorah this year?”

For those who celebrate Hanukkah, this is an easy purchase. And for those who don’t (our family especially appreciated the thorough Afterward, complete with index and the story of Hanukkah), this is still a resonant story about a family whose love for one another outshines any bumps along the way.

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Book published by Schwartz & Wade. All opinions are my own. Amazon.com affiliate links support my book-buying habit and contribute to my being able to share more great books with you–although I prefer that we all shop local when we can!

Gift Guide 2018: Favorite Picture Book of the Year

November 15, 2018 § 1 Comment

A brief note before we get started. This post will be followed by My Favorite Chapter Book of the Year. Then, I’m going to do something a little different for this Holiday Gift Guide: a series of daily mini-posts, each highlighting a different book from 2018 which I love, which has mad gift potential, and which I have not had the occasion to write about…yet. A range of ages and interests and formats. Be sure to subscribe with your email address if you want to be guaranteed to see each one. Otherwise, feel free to take your chances on Facebook (What To Read To Your Kids) or Twitter (@thebookmommy); I kindly ask that you “like” as many posts as you can to increase the chances that others see them. And now, without further ado…

My daughter fibs. I realize that sounds harsh, like what kind of parent says that about her child? Shouldn’t I soften my words and say that she only pretends or exaggerates or bends the truth, because even though she’s only eight, she’s old enough to realize that sometimes the world looks better in our minds than it does in reality? Indeed, this is true. Still, she fibs.

“I give my allowance away to the poor every month,” Emily announced to a car full of older children on our way home from school. (Ummm, you’ve never done that.) Two years ago, when she was in Kindergarten, she started reporting nightly that her teachers were taking away recess time if even one child misbehaved; that she had not had a proper recess in weeks. Alarmed, I scheduled a meeting with her teachers, who looked at me oddly and said, no, they had never shortened or taken away anyone’s recess. (For the rest of that year, whenever Emily would report on “transgressions” done to her or others at school, she would preface them by saying, “Now don’t tell my teachers I told you this, but….”)

I can think of several reasons for Emily’s fibbing—attention, saving face, and my own proclivity for exaggeration jump to mind—but it’s entirely possible that there’s a less overt motivator at play, one which has everything to do with her older brother’s reaction. Because fibs like these drive him absolutely, positively insane. My son regards and remarks on the world with mathematical precision. He sees any casual statement by another as an opportunity for cross-examination.

“There is no way you swam a 400 butterfly in practice, Emily. It was a 200 tops, and even that is unlikely for a group of eight year olds.”

“No, JP, it was a 400.”

“OK, so how many laps is that then?”

“I know how many laps it is, but I don’t feel like saying it right now.”

Author Marcy Campbell and illustrator Corinna Luyken have brilliantly captured the intersection of one child’s penchant for imagination with another’s rigid black-and-white thinking in my favorite picture book of 2018, Adrian Simcox Does NOT Have a Horse (Ages 6-9). A quiet but powerful story of developing empathy for those who experience the world differently than us, it is narrated in the stubborn, righteous voice of Chloe, who finds herself increasingly annoyed by one of her classmates, a red-haired loner of a boy named Adrian, who “tells anyone who will listen that he has a horse.”

Chloe tells anyone who will listen—her friends, her father, her mother—why Adrian is absolutely, positively fibbing. For one, she and Adrian live in a town (“and I know you have a can’t have a horse in a town”). For two, Chloe has on good authority from her friend Kelsey that horses are super expensive, and Adrian’s family is clearly poor (he gets free lunch at school and “his shoes have holes”). For three, horses require a lot of work, and Adrian can’t even keep his desk neat.

So why does Adrian spin tales of a “beautiful horse with its white coat and golden mane,” a horse with “the biggest, brownest eyes of any horse, anywhere?” And why does everyone but Chloe seem enchanted, even bewitched by this fiction; why do they refuse to see the cold, hard facts? The entire ordeal rattles Chloe to the core. It insults her mile-wide streak of justice. I know this, not only by the way she talks with her hands on her hips and her nose in the air, but because this is precisely how my son would regard such proclamations. He, too, might even stoop to what Chloe does next, vindictively exploding on the playground, “He’s lying! Adrian Simcox does NOT have a horse!” My son would think he was helping his victim, defending the Truth above all else, but he would also hopefully recognize the effect of his words.

Even though I was upside down,
I could see that made Adrian Simcox really sad.

Still, Chloe is unmoved in her righteousness. When she returns home that evening, telling her mom “how Adrian was lying about his horse again,” her mom takes a page out of the show-not-tell-book of parenting. “Chloe, it’s time to take Chompers for a walk,” she says. (Chompers being their dog. Chompers being “a perfectly normal pet to have in town.”) With Chloe and the dog following, her mom marches down the street to a part of town clearly not frequented by Chloe. “All the houses looked like they might fall down, and even though it wasn’t trash day, it looked like it was.”

The mom, of course, is taking Chloe to where Adrian Simcox lives. With his grandfather. “I could see the backyard. It was no place for a horse, of course.” And yet, the careful reader will begin to see (and will enjoy flipping back pages to confirm) what it takes Chloe a few more pages to understand. That for everyone in the book who believes in Adrian’s horse—and, especially, for Adrian himself—there is the hint of a horse if we focus our eyes just right. Call it a ghost, a mirage, a trick of the eye. It is Adrian’s horse, and it is as much a part of the landscape as it is in his mind’s eye.

Corinna Luyken’s illustrations (we first fell in love with A Book of Mistakes) are nothing short of extraordinary, as much for the way she organically weaves the horse’s silhouette into her landscapes, as for the way she uses the horse as a kind of window into Adrian’s soul: the seeking curve of the horse’s neck, the gentle sweep of its mane, the kindness in its eye. Adrian doesn’t just want people to see his horse; he wants people to see him. To see past the rotten hand he has been dealt in the house and clothes and food and school supplies department.

When the two children face off in Adrian’s yard, Chloe is ready to deliver an accusation similar to the one she yelled on the playground. But then she sees the same look on Adrian’s face, and her words catch in her throat. Adrian breaks the silence by tossing her a ball. For the first time, she notices his smile. For the first time, she asks him about his horse. For the first time, she understands: “Adrian Simcox had just about the best imagination of any kid in our whole school.”

Throughout the story, Luyken imbues each child with a specific color palette. Chloe is typically shown wearing or surrounded by rosy pinks and mauve, while Adrian is defined by his fiery orange hair, set off by deep golds. In the final page—when we at last can make out most of the horse’s body—the two palettes come together: blending, complementing, and producing something much more magnificent than the sum of its parts.

This is what connection looks like. This is what empathy looks like. My favorite picture book of the year.

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Review copy by Dial Books for Young Readers. All opinions are my own. Amazon.com affiliate links support my book-buying habit and contribute to my being able to share more great books with you–although I prefer that we all shop local when we can!

How The Penderwicks Saw Us Through 24 Days of Rain

October 25, 2018 § 6 Comments

Last month, Northern Virginia saw twenty-four days of rain. Adding insult to injury, this deluge of wet, gloomy weather happened during the one month each year when our family barely holds it together in the first place. Where the ensuing chaos of back-to-school transitions is trumped only by the fact that both my children once upon a time insisted on entering the world within two weeks of one another (and have since insisted that their celebrations never overlap).

Fortunately, we are not strangers to the salvation of the right chapter book series for back-to-school season (see here). Still, I have never been as thankful for one particular set of literary characters as I was last month.

Exhibit A begins when my (almost) eleven year old came upon me at the kitchen counter, surveying a spread of Tupperware containers.

“Can you read Penderwicks to me and Emily?” he blurted out.

(Um, do I look like I am available for reading, you good-for-nothing…) “I have to make dinner.”

“Oh. Right. What are we having?”

“I’m going to turn these various leftover vegetables into quesadillas.”

“Wait, can I make the dinner instead? Then you could sit and read to us, and I could listen while I cook.”

You are going to WHAT?! (As much as I’d like to tell you I have kids who regularly help out with cooking, I do not have kids who regularly help out with cooking. Getting them to trim green beans can be a knock-down-drag-out fight.)

And yet, as I took my place on the couch next to my daughter, ours backs to the ensuing sounds of banging and clattering coming from the kitchen, the incredible happened. My son sautéed vegetables. He grated cheese. He filled tortillas and then flipped each one on a cast-iron skillet until it was perfectly browned. He used the pizza cutter to make equal wedge-like slices. All the time, I read from The Penderwicks in Spring. Together, we laughed and leaned in and pretended it wasn’t pouring rain outside for the umpteenth day in a row, pretended that spring was springing outside our window like it was outside the Penderwicks’ house.

The Penderwicks: a family so fun, so funny, so well-meaning, so deliciously and perfectly flawed, that they cannot fail to bring out the best in everyone who knows them.

“Are you ready for us?” I asked, turning to see three heaping plates on the counter.

“No, keep going,” JP replied. “I want to make the table look extra nice before we sit down.”

I give myself a tiny bit of credit for this. I always knew we would want to binge read The Penderwicks books (Ages 8-12), by award-winning Jeanne Birdsall, so I not only waited until the last one in the series came out (this past spring), I also waited until my kids were almost eight and eleven—the perfect ages for a series whose later books take on increasingly mature terrain, as the characters themselves age (romantic pitfalls and all).

We flew through The Penderwicks and The Penderwicks on Gardam Street over the summer, then finished The Penderwicks at Point Mouette during the first week of school, yearning nostalgically for our own travels to Maine (Maine’s Point Mouette being the site of the Penderwicks’ two-week, unplugged summer vacation.). That left The Penderwicks in Spring and The Penderwicks at Last for September and October.

Who are these infectious creatures? While the Penderwicks family (spoiler alert) picks up some new additions as the series goes on, the spotlight initially focuses on four sisters and their affable, eccentric single father. Rosalind, the eldest, can be bossy, but she’s also fiercely protective of her younger siblings, having stepped up to care for them after their mother died of cancer (four years before the start of the first book).

Skye, next in line, may resemble her late mother’s conventionally beautifully features, but her tomboy personality, infuriating stubbornness, fondness for the soccer field, and astute mathematical mind sometimes make her feel like the “black sheep” of the family.

Then there’s hopelessly romantic Jane—the sibling who regularly elicits the most giggles from my brood—who, as an aspiring author, sees everything around her as potential fodder for her fictional series about a heroine named Sabrina Starr (although don’t count her out on the soccer field, either).

Finally, there’s Batty, just four years old when the series begins (but who stars as a fifth grader and college student in the final two books), and whose devotion to fairy wings, mishaps, and animals—including her beloved dog, Hound—wins over everyone she meets.

Who is our favorite? That answer changes faster than I can turn the page. Birdsall continuously develops her characters: they ebb and flow and keep us guessing, all the while taking up residence inside our hearts. The cast of supporting characters—most of them boys—is equally memorable.

If this is a book whose main characters are girls, does that mean it’s a girl book? YOU HUSH UP RIGHT NOW. True, my daughter now claims The Penderwicks as her second favorite series of all time, after Harry Potter. BUT ALSO, my son will tell you it is now his third favorite series, after HP and Percy Jackson. That my son’s enthusiasm matches his sister’s isn’t just high praise: it is proof positive that author Shannon Hale (a.k.a. Princess in Black) knows what she’s talking about when she says there is absolutely nothing about being a boy that predisposes you to enjoy only stories about boys—and that we as parents better stop pushing our own bias on our children.

Besides being filled with fleshed-out characters, what makes this realistic fiction so enticing, so worthy of sitting your mother down and cooking for her?! While The Penderwicks books are set in today’s time, largely in a fictional Boston suburb named Cameron, they have a charm—especially against a backdrop of increasingly “heavy” middle-grade fiction—which feels refreshingly old-fashioned. They feel like the timeless tales we remember from our own childhood, the ones which kept us warm during winter nights, which helped us pass lazy summer days on a porch swing.

Sure, the Penderwick siblings get into scrapes—but they are scrapes with bulls, or runaway rabbits, or with the prickly mother of their best friend (and “honorary sibling”) Jeffrey. These are girls who climb trees to sneak into the bedroom of a friend in need; who run off brooding to throw rocks into the ocean and almost drown trying to save a dog; who sneak into golf courses in the early dawn to spy on moose.

Sure, the Penderwick siblings are not perfect. They squander; they dig in their heels; they let misunderstandings brew and nearly swallow them up. Their relationships with one another change over time, alliances form and break apart. But they continue to abide by what they call Penderwick Family Honor. They continue to call MOPS (Meeting of the Penderwick Sisters) to formulate Great Plans, like how to keep their beloved father from marrying again, or how to stop a fellow sibling from running away. They continue to act with the conviction that they are stronger together.

Sure, their adventures are crafted, often hilariously so, to keep us breathless with excitement—but they are also adventures which feel alluringly like the simple, pure, pared-down essence of childhood. For our children reading these books, the Penderwicks are a harbinger of all that is good and true in this world: of curiosity, of kindness, of laughter, of resilience, of familial bonds which stand strong against the currents of time.

In short, they are exactly the thing to read when life—or twenty-four days of rain—has got you down.

—

Books published by Alfred A. Knopf. All opinions are my own. Amazon.com affiliate links support my book-buying habit and contribute to my being able to share more great books with you–although I prefer that we all shop local when we can!

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