The Penderwicks on Gardam Street

I seem to do a great job of keeping the best books for my first read of these 48 Hour Challenges - even if I can only remember that last year's first was -- oh, all right, reviewing time is time well spent, and I shall try to find out whether it was just last year's Green Glass Sea that was a best first...   [few minutes later] - well, hunh.  First book of the 2006 Challenge was Hilary McKay's Caddy Ever After, which was not my favourite of the Casson family books, but I still enjoyed it a lot and it's -- relevant, perhaps -- to this book.  (But then a lot of kids' books are.)

Right, so The Penderwicks on Gardam Street.  I've realised that I never got around to doing a rave write-up about The Penderwicks, and I'm certainly not going to manage to do any kind of job on that now, but it's a book about a family (4 girls, aged from 12 down to 4, their father, and Hound) and it's a book about other children's books and it'll remind you of all your favourite children's family books - E. Nesbit and Enright's Melendys and Streatfield's familes and Edward Eager and The Swallows and Amazons and I'm sure I've forgotten a few.  (The two books inspired in me a mad impulse to reread every children's classic I'd ever read and enjoyed, in order to spot the allusions - was that tomato sandwich in the first a nod to Harriet the Spy? And the black watch Skye nearly buys in the hospital gift shop in the Prologue of The Penderwicks on Gardam Street - surely that's to the Fossils?  Or have I confused it with something else? And so on and so forth.)  I was left after reading the first deeply worried about the eldest, Rosalind, and her loving dependability and taking on of responsibility. This despite the fact that the Latin-spouting, mathematical father is a wonder, not a Victorian broken-hearted widower who neglects his girls.

The book proper starts the autumn after the first book, with the girls back home, and their Aunt Claire (the perfect aunt, despite what follows) coming to visit, with presents.  I started my 48 hours latish last night, and before turning off the light, had already marked two passages and entered that wonderful state of reading-happiness some books can give. 

So Rosalind handed out the packages.  Jane's was indeed books, six of them by Eva Ibbotson, one of her favorite authors. Skye got an impressive pair of binoculars, army issue and with night vision.  And Rosalind's gift was two sweaters, one white and one blue.

"Two!" she said. "Something is definitely wrong."

"And my books are all hardbound, and two of them I haven't read even once yet," added Jane. These must be Aunt Claire's dying gifts."

The second passage was the end of the father and Aunt Claire's reading The Sailor Dog to Batty, who makes them sing the song, so I went off to bed with the tune of the song I'd made up when reading the book to Becca and Y.D. firmly stuck in my head.  (It's a bit monotonous, to be perfectly honest.)  Eva Ibbotson and one of Margaret Wise Brown's dog books - any wonder I went to bed in happy reader mode?

The only problem is having far, far too many delights I want to share, having finished now.  And then so much of the delight is hard to quote anyway, as it's made up of a lot of little moments which are about how nice these kids are, without being unbearably or unrealistically good.  (There's a fair amount of behaviour in the book that decidedly isn't good, although it may be well-meant. Or not so much.  But never mean or petty.)  There's Rosalind trying to choose one of Shakespeare's sonnets to memorize, knowing that she'll have to recite it to the class, and desperate to find one that nobody will understand at all well enough to know it's about love.  Or the play Skye writes is supposed to write for history, Sisters and Sacrifice - and the essay on women in the history of Massachusetts that Jane gets a C on, after writing it about her fictional heroine because she's "more fascinating than old Susan B. Anthony and Clara Barton" - and the one she writes  is supposed to write on science. 

I have heard (or possibly heard about another book and misapplied to this one) criticism that the book would have more appeal for adults who are channeling their inner reading child-selves than for real children, but I can only say with some certainty that I'd have loved it myself as a child, and with about equal certainty that my two would have loved it.  And I'd have had enormous pleasure in reading it to them.  The one definite nod over the head of the average child is the woman the father finds himself to date, Marianne.  As that's Marianne Dashwood, the adult reader is sniggering helplessly at his reports on her love of walking and dislike of flannel, while younger children wouldn't get it.  But though I have some doubt about Aunt Claire's missing the name, I honestly think I'd have been perfectly happy as a child to have had the deception pulled on me along with the girls.  And he confesses so beautifully. 

Right, so Claire's not spotting Marianne's name, and perhaps a bit of realistic quibbling about the timing of some things in the book.  But that's it for the pickiness.  And the nice Penderwicks - child and adult - are matched by nice people in other families (Tommy - Nick - Anna and her succession of stepmothers she doesn't bother to keep track of anymore!) and the lovely Iantha, who's a brilliant astrophysicist as well as a - well, read it and see for yourself.  I think if nothing else, I'd love this book for the funny and yet real way in which the girls use the word 'honour'.  There's 'the family honour', but there's also 'honourable behaviour' - and 'dishonourable' as well - and they care about it, without in any way being goody-goody.  Great stuff.

Sweethearts

I know I've already left a proper write-up for so long that I had to reread before writing one - not that rereading was in any way an onerous job - and you'd think that having just finished the blessed thing and having a lot of thoughts about it, not to mention a great desire to enthuse with a probably very wordy enthusing, I'd just write the definitive babble NOW.  But I'm going to leave some of it for later, because sartorias recently asked people why they read YA if they do, and I want to do a better job of answering that question than I did then and there, and Sara Zarr's Sweethearts is a very good book to discuss in the process. 

I wish I could remember whose review(s) of the book prompted me to read it, as I might have been less than totally convinced about it, with the title and the cover (although there's nothing wrong with the cover in itself, it still seems misleadingly pink and fluffy, which it both is and isn't, in reality), and even the description on the inside jacket might have left me a little wary.  It tells of 17 year old Jenna Vaughn, "popular, happy and dating", who used to be Jennifer Harris - a 'social outcast' with just one friend, Cameron, who disappeared when she was nine.  Although Jenna has transformed herself, and believes she's effectively killed off her old self, when Cameron suddenly reappears, both "are confronted with memories of their shared past".  Could have been -- well, it could have been a lot of beverages that might have been some readers' cuppas, but wouldn't have been mine.  In fact, I found it impressive, engaging, moving and a very good example of one of the reasons I read YA.

It's a book that is about memory, for one thing, and as Jenna says, "some memories are slippery".  She can't remember a lot of things about Cameron that she'd like to, though one of her clearest memories - of a terrifying encounter with his father on her 9th birthday - is impossible to shake, and is revealed to the reader gradually, in small pieces.  The build-up of tension doesn't feel at all manipulative though, as it's how Jenna allows herself to connect with her past self, when she does allow herself to.  Her description of the effort it takes to behave like a 'normal' person - to be the friend and the girlfriend she knows she's expected to be - of having observed 'from the outside' how she'd have to behave to be accepted - is truly moving.  Because it comes from her childhood, when she feels so wrong that Cameron's father's abusive comments, aimed at both her and Cameron, make her react like this:

... I wonder what is wrong with me that even Cameron's father can look at me and see the truth: that I'm ugly and fat and no one wants to be my friend.  It makes me feel guilty.  The fact that Cameron does want to be my friend somehow makes his dad act mean like this.  If I were thinner and prettier, if I had the right clothes like Jordana and Charity, then maybe it would make Cameron's dad see him in a different way.  A better way.

Sweethearts is also about abuse, and about unhealthy responses to bullying, and rejection, and neglect.  It's got two teens who've been through more than children should ever have to face, and without sufficient help from their parents.  Jennifer stole comfort food and Jenna still has a very uneasy relationship with food. But the book neither makes these problems definitive and imprisoning, nor is annoyingly uplifty about everyone's power to rise above the past and its problems - Jenna's effort to do that isn't lastingly successful nor finally what she wants.

I've hit the realisation that I'm too tired to talk about Jenna's mother, or her wonderful, wonderful stepfather Alan, and too tired to try to make this sound a little less sappy, and definitely too tired to talk about the question of identity and how we can tell ourselves stories about our past which may not be the whole of the story and the cost that can have...   Maybe I'll manage more of that when I come back to the book and sartorias' post, and try to talk about its appeal for an adult.