The Penderwicks on Gardam Street

The Penderwicks on Gardam Street by Jeanne Birdsall is a warm family story for 9 year olds about four sisters who decide their father absolutely must not be allowed to start dating.

What happens

This isn't the first book about this lot. The girls have just come back from a summer at a place called Arundel, where they met a boy named Jeffrey, and this one picks up in the September afterwards.

Aunt Claire arrives for the weekend with an envelope in her pocket. Inside is a letter the girls' mother wrote in hospital before she died, asking that in three or four years somebody should nudge Martin Penderwick back out into the world, because he's far too shy to do it himself and she can't bear to think of him lonely.

Four years and four months have gone by. Aunt Claire thinks it's time.

The sisters do not. So they come up with the Save-Daddy Plan, which mostly involves finding him the worst dates in Massachusetts in the hope that he gives the whole idea up as a bad job.

It is very funny, and it goes about as well as you would expect.

What lifts it above the joke is Rosalind. She's twelve and she has been the one collecting Batty from nursery, getting the tea on and holding everyone together since she was eight. She is also the one who overheard that conversation in the hospital, and she has never told a soul.

If you've got a reader who likes picking a favourite, they will have one inside twenty pages. Skye is furious and scientific. Jane narrates her own life as though it were a novel. Batty is four and talks to the dog.

Something to know before you hand it over. The prologue is the mother's death. She is in hospital with the new baby, she has cancer, and she dies within those few pages. It is the opening of the book rather than a turn later on, and everything else happens four years afterwards, but it is direct and tender and a child who has lost a parent will feel it.

The book is not sad after that. There is pineapple upside-down cake, spying on the new neighbours through the forsythia, and a dog who starts barking the moment Batty turns into the street. But the missing person is always in the room, which is precisely why the girls fight so hard over their father.

What to read next

If this one goes down well, The Penderwicks at Point Mouette splits the sisters up for a fortnight and leaves Skye in charge of the younger two, entirely certain she is going to make a mess of it.