When you were young, did you love reading Little Women?  Ever long to be on Prince Edward Island with Anne Shirley of Anne of Green Gables?  Then you will love the Penderwick family.

There are two Penderwick books  (and my daughter adores them both):  The Penderwicks:  A Summer Tale of Four Sisters, Two Rabbits, and a Very Interesting Boy (Knopf, 2005) and The Penderwicks On Gardam Street (Random House, 2008).

Author Jeanne Birdsall has created a charming family of four sisters:  responsible oldest sister Rosalind; feisty tomboy Skye; creative and romantic Jane (the writer of the family); and shy animal-loving Batty.  Together with their kindly, albeit sometimes absent-minded father, these four sisters have all kinds of misadventures. 

In the first Penderwick book, the family has gone on vacation to a summer cottage called Arundel.  There they make a charming new friend–Jeffrey.  But Jeffrey has a stuffy, bossy mother, “snooty Mrs. Tipton,” and she’s dating an even more horrid, snooty man who just might become Jeffrey’s step-father.  To make matters worse, Mrs. Tipton has her heart set on Jeffrey attending a military academy and becoming a general just like her dear papa, even though Jeffrey has tried to tell her how much he hates the idea.  How will the Penderwick sisters save Jeffrey from this awful fate?

The Penderwicks on Gardam Street begins right after the summer vacation at Arundel.  Here we see the family back at home starting a new school year with neighbors, school friends, and soccer teams.  Oldest sister Rosalind is now twelve and is looking forward to the grown-up responsibility of finally being able to watch her younger sisters without a babysitter. 

As we learn in the first Penderwick book, Mrs. Penderwick died of cancer a few years earlier.  While the family misses her and is sometimes sad, the Penderwicks are refreshingly functional  and don’t brood over this distressing fact.  Life seems to be running on a contented, even keel. 

Then Aunt Claire arrives with a blue envelope–a letter written by their mother just before her death.  She had asked Aunt Claire to wait four years and then give the letter to Mr. Penderwick.  In the letter, Mrs. Penderwick says that she wants Mr. Penderwick to begin dating.  Although resolved to honor the request of his dead wife, shy, botany professor Mr. Penderwick is not happy about the prospect.  Neither are the girls.  A step-mother!  What could be worse?  How will the Penderwick sisters save Daddy and themselves from this awful fate?  Is it an awful fate?  It must be, just look at Snow White.

Both Penderwick books have a nostalgic charm.  Yes, there are computers and the Internet, but the books feel whimsically old-fashioned and reminiscent of an earlier, more innocent time.  While the sisters occasionally squabble, they are loyal friends.  They love and respect each other and adore their father.  They feel bound to their family and the “Penderwick family honor” which includes traits like honesty, integrity, and saying “I’m sorry.”  Whether conspiring to disable their father’s car, trading homework, or falling for the boy next door, the Penderwick sisters are simply enchanting.

(This post is in honor of my mother Marian, one of the wisest–and kindest–women I have ever known.)

The Owl and the Pussy-cat is a famous nonsense poem written by the English poet, author, and illustrator Edward Lear.  A contemporary of Lewis Carroll, Lear first published the poem in 1871, and it has been illustrated and re-illustrated ever since.  The edition to the left was illustrated by Paul Galdone (Clarion, 1987).   Jan Brett also illustrated a Caribbean-style version in 1989 (Philomel).

The Owl and the Pussy-cat  is charming and silly, lilting and eminently memorizable.  When I was a girl, my mother recited this poem and had us children memorize it (the other great nonsense poem we learned being “The Purple Cow” by Gelett Burgess).  I believe all of my six siblings can still recite ”The Owl and the Pussycat” to this day (and shame on them if they can’t). 

After the owl and the pussy-cat sailed away in “a beautiful pea-green boat,” Owl serenaded his lovely Puss by the light of the stars.  Being a liberated female,

Not to worry.   After “sail[ing] away for a year and a day,” the couple finds an enterprising Piggy who is delighted to sell them his nose ring.  They are married the very next day by a turkey and celebrate with a magnificent feast using runcible spoons (a term coined by Lear and now in the dictionary).  They end the perfect wedding with dancing on the beach “by the light of the moon, the moon, the moon.”

Really, could there be anything more romantic?

So here’s to my mother, Marian.  Intelligent, compassionate, wise, and abundantly unselfish.   How we miss her.

The Country Bunny and the Little Gold Shoes by DuBose Heyward and illustrated by Marjorie Flack tells the story of the five Easter bunnies.  Yes, five.  If you haven’t read the story, you probably didn’t know there were five.

At any rate, a little country girl bunny decided that she wanted to grow up to be an Easter bunny.  But all the fancy white bunnies and big Jack-rabbits with their long legs laughed at her.   ”The little girl Cottontail grew up to be a young lady Cottontail.  And by and by she had a husband and then one day, much to her surprise there were twenty-one Cottontail babies to take care of.”  And all the fancy white rabbits and big Jack-rabbits laugh at her again and say, “Only a country rabbit would go and have all those babies.  Now take care of them and leave Easter eggs to great big men bunnies like us.”  I kid you not.  That is a direct quote from the book.

Well, those baby bunnies grew and their Cottontail mama taught two of them to sweep, two to make beds, two to cook, two to wash dishes, two to wash linens, two to sew and mend, two to sing and two to dance to entertain the others while they worked, two to garden, and two to paint, and the last little bunny she made keeper of her chair, and he pulled out the chair for her at supper.

Eventually the time came again to pick another Easter bunny.   Little Cottontail Mother and her family travelled to the Palace of Easter Eggs to see Old Grandfather pick the newest Easter bunny.  And naturally Old Grandfather picked Cottontail Mother because she was wise, kind, and swift, and the kids would have no trouble taking care of things while she was gone (don’t ask me where Papa bunny was–the story doesn’t say a word about him). 

The Country Bunny and the Little Gold Shoes was first published in 1939 Houghton Mifflin not long after women got the vote, but well before the Women’s Movement of the 60′s.  Little Cottontail Bunny is the original supermom.  She breaks through the glass ceiling of male Easter bunnies, proves her bravery and gets fancy gold shoes to boot.  And she does it all before her little baby bunnies wake up.

Well, what can you say about Mother Goose?  My mother adored Mother Goose and read it to us often.  But frankly, as a parent I never really got into it.  I know the historic and literary relevance of nursery rhymes, but they just didn’t do much for me.  My kids never seemed much interested in them either.

Then I got the Mother Goose edition selected and illustrated by Mary Engelbreit (HarperCollins, 2005 with an introduction by the esteemed children’s literature historian Leonard S. Marcus).  And my attitude changed.  It’s just about impossible to resist the charms of Mary Engelbreit’s illustrations.

Mother Goose became my daughter’s favorite book.  And page fifty contains her favorite rhyme:

Ickle ockle, blue bockle,

Fishes in the sea,

If you want a pretty maid,

Please choose me. 

And why was this her favorite rhyme?  Because of its illustration:  a charming, little mermaid awash in a cascade of sunken treasure jewelry.  “Oh, to be a mermaid!”  My favorite illustration was Jack Spratt and his wife, but every night my daughter turned to page fifty before any other. 

So if you have a nursery rhyme resistant child, try Mary Engelbreit’s Mother Goose.   It just might convert them.

Some children’s books are classics.  Take Munro Leaf’s The Story of Ferdinand (Robert Lawson, illustrator).  Originally published in 1936 by Viking, Ferdinand tells the story of a gentle, little bull who doesn’t want to butt and stick his horns around.  Ferdinand wants to “sit just quietly under the cork tree and smell the flowers.” 

But when Ferdinand sits on a bee and gets stung, Ferdinand gets picked to fight in the bullfight in Madrid.  Will Ferdinand fight?

Ferdinand is a charmer–from his hulking adult body rippling with muscles to his scared little face peeking around the doorway of the bull ring to his beatific bovine body plopped down in the center of the bullring completely content to just sit and smell the flowers from all the lovely ladies.  (The picture of the lovely ladies with flowers in their hair was always my favorite when I was a girl.) 

It’s interesting to consider that this book was written when Hitler was butting and sticking his horns around plenty.  At the time of its publication, The Story of Ferdinand was banned in Spain and burned as propoganda by Nazi Germany.  

But the world would be a better place if people were more like Ferdinand and his mother.  Ferdinand doesn’t fall for the peer pressure of the other little bulls.  His mother perfectly understands when to gently pressure and when to back off and let her child make his own decision.  Face it, sometimes animals are much better people than people.  Just ask Charlotte and Wilbur.