Run with me on this, I get to the point eventually.
I was late on the bandwagon with Gilmore Girls, I only started watching after my dad ran the series with my grandma and insisted “no really, you’ll like this.” It all felt a bit hallmark card-y at first until the series kept going and I went from thinking “yeah, this is a total grandma show” to “holy shit, my GRANDMA likes this show?!”
The Penderwicks remind me a lot of Gilmore Girls, with a splash of the Bennett siblings if Pride and Prejudice had Mr Bennett as father and mother to the girls.
The book(s, presumably. I’ve only read the one so far) follow the precocious Penderwick siblings – mostly sisters – in a setting so charming that but for a few details one wouldn’t recognize it as modern. It all seems very precious and very twee, until the big reveal, which manages to be heart wrenching and unmistakably childish (and child-appropriate) at once. You go from bored to riveted without realizing it and without much changing before the climax even hits, and the author gives appropriate weight to the dramas of childhood without the wink and nod so often found in such treatments. A younger sibling wrestling with whether to share a secret entrusted to him might seem laughable to an adult, but it is never treated that way by Birdsall or her adult characters.
The one detriment was likely my own fault; it took me a long time to sort out just who was whom particularly in relation to other characters, but that’s what you get when you pick up a book midseries, I suppose.
I picked this up because it was remaindered, but this book grew on me and was so charming I can’t wait for more.