Thirty-five

On the trek to Waycross to see my Mom and my brother, I did what I always do, what I've done since I was 10 for a long (or short) car trip. I brought a book. Sometimes I bring knitting, but always, I bring a book. I'm among the fortunate that can read in a car without hurling like a sorority girl at the end of a Greek Week mixer. At the beginning of the school year, I picked up a title from the kidlit section at Borders, an unfamiliar book with a big gold sticker that said National Book Award. It had an old-fashioned cover design to go along with an old fashioned title: The Penderwicks. I slipped it in my work bag and haven't had the time to look at it since August until today.
Kids' lit has gone through quite an evolution in the last 40 or 50 years. In contemporary fiction, the themes have become more realistic, more like children's lives and that's a good thing because kids need to recognize their world in the stories they choose to read. Modern kids' lit can be very dark, but it's also filled with fluffy family stories like the Judy Moody series or the Abby Hayes series. Average writing. They are filled with cheeky dialogue of the modern age, "Whatever!" and "I'm like never speaking to you!." It sounds like kids today.
The Penderwicks is a genuine treat. It's a modern family story with an old-fashioned charm. For fans of the late great Madeline L'Engle, you will feel the resemblance in tone and character but it stands as original work, through and through. I'm also a fan of Little Women so I love a story about sisters, and this is about four of them spending the summer in the Berkshires with their father. I loved that major tragedy stays away from the girls, I loved that they were smart and that their botonist father often spouted Latin to them (they often rolled their eyes but never directly at him), I loved that they weren't perfect and they fought like sisters do and I loved that the writing doesn't assume for a minute that children do not enjoy an elegantly written sentence.
What I loved the most was that I was able to live right there with the Penderwicks for the entire length of that trip and they didn't mind at all. A bit of bliss on state road 23.