Tadiana ✩Night Owl☽'s Reviews > The Penderwicks: A Summer Tale of Four Sisters, Two Rabbits, and a Very Interesting Boy

I'm upping to 5 stars on reread. This is a timeless, heartwarming middle grade story of the Penderwick family and their three week vacation one August in a rental cottage in the Berkshire mountains, in western Massachusetts.



It may not sound too exciting, but with the Penderwicks, everything is an adventure! The family consists of:

❧ Mr. Penderwick, a widower who loves plants and randomly speaks in Latin to his daughters;
❧ Rosalind, age 12, who's taken on the caregiver role for her younger sisters;
❧ Skye, 11, an adventurous girl whose blunt, occasionally ill-considered words sometimes get her in trouble;
❧ Jane, 10, aspiring author and soccer player. Often speaks as though she's writing one of her heroine's adventures ("For although Sabrina Starr had enough courage to face her adversaries, it was nice when she didn't have to.");
❧ Elizabeth ("Batty"), age 4, animal lover extraordinaire who wears fairy wings every day; and
❧ Hound, Batty's faithful companion.

They meet Jeffrey (the "Very Interesting Boy" of the title); his alarmingly stern high society mother, who is renting the cottage to the Penderwick family, the handsome teenage gardener Cagney and his two pet rabbits, a belligerent bull in a pasture, and more. And they all learn and grow just a little in the course of their three-week stay in the Berkshire cottage that summer.

I'm convinced that telling a middle grade tale well enough to charm both young and old is a truly difficult thing to pull off well, and takes a lot of talent. I bought this book about ten years ago for my daughter, who was about 9 years old at the time, and we both loved it. The Penderwick girls are vivid, quirky and varied personalities; I never had trouble remembering which girl was which. A recommended read, especially for young girls!

Now to try to lay my hands on copies of the sequels ...

Original post: I remember this as a completely delightful middle grade book about a family of young sisters and their family vacation one summer, but I haven't read it for years. For some reason it grabbed my attention today, even though I should be reading other books. We'll see how it holds up on reread!