For the Penderwick Family Honor

I checked out The Penderwicks: A Summer Tale of Four Sisters, Two Rabbits, and a Very Interesting Boy (Jeanne Birdsall) from the library last month – the first of my summer reads. And actually rather fitting that I would share a three-week reading vacation with them. They were, after all, spending their three-week summer vacation in the book, at Arundel cottage, at the cusp of puberty (well, three of the four anyway) and finding their ways to growing up.

I was slow, at first, to warm up to the story. It seemed a little formulaic to me in those opening pages. With the maternal older sister just discovering boys, the fiercely independent, math-friendly sister with her aversion to tchotchkes and disarray, the starry-eyed sister who reads poetry and writes adventure stories chronicling the imagined exploits of her alter-ego, and the littlest, precious sister who is just, well, little and precious. Ho hum I thought. And the lot of them sat on my nightstand for weeks.

I’m not exactly sure why I picked the book up again. Maybe the pressure of the library’s deadline. Maybe a refusal to be bested by a young adult novel. But I did, which is the important part. And that Batty (Elizabeth) – the young, precious Penderwick sister – completely charmed me out of my skepticism. With the butterfly wings she’s appropriated into her daily wardrobe, the standing very still and quiet to become invisible when she feels shy, the telling of secrets to her dog, Hound. But mostly she got me when she met the caretaker’s rabbits, who are normally as shy as she. But not with her. No, when they met Batty they hopped right out of their hiding places and up to her hands, which she’d placed palms up on the floor as an invitation. She rubbed their little velveteen noses and was utterly, genuinely taken aback and thrilled to say, “Oh! They love me!”

Yep. That was the end of me. That moment right there.

I can also report that she caught a lightening bug named Horatio. And that her favorite toys are, I think, the most perfect menagerie of stuffies: Sedgewick the Horse, Funty the elephant, Urusula the bear, and Fred the other bear. (Yes. I will devote significant craft hours to recreating that team.)

I could tell you so much more about her and her equally charming sisters, and their sweet, lonely, nerdy, kind, Jim Broadbent-y father, but I would hate to spoil it for you. And I would attempt to entice the remaining holdouts by quoting a handful of particularly sweet vignettes from the novel directly, but I had to return it to the library. You see, while the book was busy lounging on my nightstand, someone placed it on hold . Which normally, I don’t worry much about. But this time I pictured a sweet, real-life Batty counting the days until the Saturday in the end of June when the call would come that her book is ready. I imagined her feeling sad once that Saturday passed, wondering who would possibly go about breaking promises they made to the library. I remembered how Batty (in the book) put on her brave face and went to the caretaker's house to meet the rabbits even though she was still uncertain as to whether or not she liked the caretaker. Because he'd already told the rabbits she was coming, and she couldn’t bear the thought of disappointing them. She knew how sad it was to feel disappointed. (Uff.) So I've returned the book. I can't bear (any longer) the thought of disappointing real-life Batty.

It's on the way to her now. And I hope she finds the note I tucked inside:

I am. And I do.