While I wait for Birdsall to ascend to power, I'll just have to keep running away to her books. The latest, The Penderwicks on Gardam Street (Alfred A. Knopf, 2008), left me wishing that more reads could feel like that one: like a walk through a sunlit autumn lawn with piles of crisp leaves waiting to be kicked, tossed, or dived into. And seriously, it's not as corny as I make it sound. It is corny--I won't lie--but it is also really, really fun. The corniness is believable and natural and not at all sickening or preachy. The characters are completely and utterly lovable, especially, of course, the four Penderwick sisters Rosalind, Skye, Jane, and Batty.
I think my favorite thing about the girls is their sense of Penderwick Family Honor. The sisters, each distinctively and delightfully quirky, have formed a solid front since their mother died in Batty's infancy; they are determined to take care of each other and their sweet, Latin-spouting absentminded-professor dad. Naturally, the foursome makes plenty of mistakes, but the scrapes the children get into are downright endearing ones, and the solution is never far away.
Sure, as an adult reader, you won't be able to shake the feeling that this story, no matter how much you are enjoying it, is not a depiction of real life by any means. But I found it equally difficult to shake the feeling that this is the way real life could be--that the world comes so close sometimes to the robust innocence in which the Penderwicks live--and I think I might know why I felt that way. It's because there was a time in my life when the world was that way for me. It happened during my childhood, when I hid in my room and flung myself into Little Women and Anne of Green Gables. Those tales wove a universe unto themselves. But I can never read those books for the first time again. How lovely, then, that Jeanne Birdsall has come along to keep that universe alive.
I think my favorite thing about the girls is their sense of Penderwick Family Honor. The sisters, each distinctively and delightfully quirky, have formed a solid front since their mother died in Batty's infancy; they are determined to take care of each other and their sweet, Latin-spouting absentminded-professor dad. Naturally, the foursome makes plenty of mistakes, but the scrapes the children get into are downright endearing ones, and the solution is never far away.
Sure, as an adult reader, you won't be able to shake the feeling that this story, no matter how much you are enjoying it, is not a depiction of real life by any means. But I found it equally difficult to shake the feeling that this is the way real life could be--that the world comes so close sometimes to the robust innocence in which the Penderwicks live--and I think I might know why I felt that way. It's because there was a time in my life when the world was that way for me. It happened during my childhood, when I hid in my room and flung myself into Little Women and Anne of Green Gables. Those tales wove a universe unto themselves. But I can never read those books for the first time again. How lovely, then, that Jeanne Birdsall has come along to keep that universe alive.
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