Book Review: The Penderwicks

The Penderwicks is a series that is recommended everywhere. It is not a series that I have in my library. In my years of moderating a massive book group, I found that this was a book series that really divides people. I read the first two books (or was it three? I can’t remember for sure) and found that I fell into the “this had so much potential to be brilliant but falls into modern tropes and makes me frustrated” camp.

For years I have mostly stayed quiet about it because those who love The Penderwicks  really  love  those stories. And there is nothing inherently wrong with the books that I read, so I just didn’t think it mattered what I thought. Years later, however, I heard so many people asking about them, so I thought it prudent to articulate my objections.

The first book, The Penderwicks: A Summer Tale of Four Sisters, Two Rabbits, and a Very Interesting Boy, was delightful. Not perfect, but refreshingly fun for a modern book. The problem is that readers very rarely are willing to read one book and not the others in a series. And the second book, The Penderwicks on Gardam Street, was definitely not delightful. Instead of a sweet and interesting family story, the girls are petulant and angsty. They are rude to each other and disrespectful of adults. I was so disappointed.

One of the recommendations for the series is that readers claim there are so many lovely literary references that bibliophiles are delighted while at the same time, the children are modern and living like we do, so it makes those old book references come alive. Maybe. Probably. However, that doesn’t negate the bad behavior of the girls.

Some claim that these are like Beverly Cleary’s books. They show girls going through real growing pains, and it gives our children someone to identify with. But, as I said in my article, In Defense of Beverly Cleary, Cleary was writing about the whole family. In her stories, adults are more than present, they are worthy characters themselves, and they provide good boundaries for their children.

In the Penderwicks books, there is a strong sense that the children know better than the adults and that they have a moral obligation to teach the adults how the world works and how to live better. Again, this is not what we see in Cleary, or Gary D. Schmidt, or N. D. Wilson. In those stories, the children understand their own value, but they do not discredit the adults who are there to love and lead them.

Some critics of the series object to the “modern realism” themes of divorce, remarriage, teenage dating, etc. I don’t object to those themes. I do, however, object to how they are presented in modern books. I can’t really say how those play out throughout the series because I stopped early in the series, but I did not love what I saw.

One of the challenges of writing a series about sisters who have a substantial span of age is that it is hard to know who the target audience is. Should children as young as the youngest sister be reading? Or are these for children who are as old as the oldest sister? In Hilda van Stockum’s The Mitchells series, we see children who are babies in the same family as children who are in high school. To make the story suitable for all ages, Hilda did mention some dances and possible romance, but she did so only very lightly. In the second Penderwicks book, teen romance is a key theme. Just because the oldest sister is old enough to be interested in boys doesn’t mean that our younger readers need that explained in detail complete with hormonal discussion.

I think that while these stories could be lovely, they miss the mark. With so many better options out there, I am keeping these out of my library.

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