Read The Penderwicks at Point Mouette free for 7 days. £7.99/month after - less than a paperback.
Jeanne Birdsall's The Penderwicks at Point Mouette is a warm summer story for 9 year olds about four sisters being split up for a fortnight and the middle one suddenly being in charge.
Two weeks isn't long. Try telling that to the Penderwicks.
Their father and his new wife have gone to England, taking the baby with them. Rosalind, the eldest at thirteen, is off to New Jersey with her best friend. That leaves Skye, Jane and Batty off to Maine in the care of Aunt Claire, and Skye, who is twelve, becoming OAP. Oldest Available Penderwick.
Skye would rather do almost anything else.
The night before they go, Rosalind calls one last Meeting of Penderwick Sisters. She has prepared six rules. Rule five is that five-year-old Batty must wear an orange life preserver whenever she is near the ocean, and since they're staying on the coast, that means always. Batty asks whether she has to wear it in bed.
Rosalind has also mentioned the rocks. And the seawalls. And drowning.
She's not wrong to fuss, exactly. Aunt Claire is the most wonderful aunt in the world and also once brushed Rosalind's teeth with shampoo and dabbed toothpaste on Skye's grazed knee. Nobody has actually expired in her care. It's a low bar and Rosalind knows it.
This isn't the first Penderwick book, and the story assumes you already know these girls. There was a summer at a big house called Arundel where they met Jeffrey, and a stepmother and a baby brother have joined the family since. Your reader will keep up, but they'll get more out of it starting earlier.
What makes these books lovely is how little needs to happen. A dog gets into the bath. Jane borrows grown-up novels for research because she's decided her heroine should fall in love. Skye looks up revenge in a Latin dictionary because Jeffrey's dreadful mother has cancelled his holiday at the last minute.
That's the register. Small domestic disasters, four sisters who tease each other constantly and would go to war for each other, and nobody needing to save a world.
If this one goes down well, go back to The Penderwicks on Gardam Street, where the girls hatch a plan to stop their father dating anyone. One thing to know first. That book opens with a short prologue at their mother's hospital bedside, and her cancer is named.
A library hand-picked by an English teacher, delivered through a calm, ad-free app. If your child already loves reading, we keep up.
7-day free trial. Then £7.99/month.
