Family Ties
Judy Freeman, Curriculum Connections -- School Library Journal, 6/2/2009
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Fiction lovers have so many fine choices when they go digging for something good to read. They can choose school, sports, or adventure stories; animal tales; and mysteries; or books about other times, other places, and even other worlds. Sometimes, though, readers just want a book about something familiar—literally. That’s when they’ll choose a novel about family life, where the main characters may encounter pitfalls, but there is often a safety net to catch them. Here are two fine examples of that, set in very different regions—small-town
If you have already read Jeanne Birdsall’s National Book Award winner, The Penderwicks: A Summer Tale of Four Sisters, Two Rabbits, and a Very Interesting Boy (Knopf, 2005), then you probably already consider yourself a literary friend to the four garrulous and free-spirited Penderwick girls. They are motherly and sensible Rosalind (age 12); science- and sports-minded Skye (age 11); aspiring author and drama queen Jane (age 10); and animal-loving Batty (age 4).
In that first book, the sisters set off with their widowed father, an absent-minded botany professor, and their dog, Hound Penderwick, for three blissful weeks in the Berkshire Mountains in Massachusetts where they had rented a cottage, part of a rambling estate. Though Skye got off on the wrong foot with Jeffrey, the boy living in the mansion next door, the siblings soon became friends with him, though not with his mother, the forbidding and disapproving Mrs. Tifton, who considers the Penderwick girls, "a little vulgar" and "definitely not in our class."
Readers are now lucky to be able to look in on the Penderwick girls in a second book, The Penderwicks on Gardam Street (Knopf, 2008; Gr 4-7). While this book refers to events of the previous summer, the novel stands alone. (Will you like this sequel even better than the first book? Depends on which you like better: idyllic summer vacation stories or get-back-to-school-and-real-life-again tales.) The Penderwicks on Gardam Street begins with a heartbreaking prologue of a pivotal event in their lives—the death of their mother from cancer only two weeks after Batty was born.
It's now four years and four months later, and the girls and the family is coping well until the arrival of Aunt Claire, Daddy's sister. Claire has a letter for her brother written by his wife before she died, expressing the hope that he will some day date again. The letter sends the family into a tailspin. Skye comes up with the “Save Daddy Plan” to fix him up with awful women so he won't consider remarrying, but that backfires, luckily.
Each chapter in this warmly comical family saga focuses on a different sister-in-crisis. Rosalind may like her football-obsessed neighbor Tommy as more than an old friend. Skye tries and fails to control her anger on the soccer field. Jane writes a play for Skye's dreaded Aztec assignment, and the teacher loves it so much, it’s going to be staged with a reluctant Skye as the star. Jane would love to take Skye’s place onstage, but she can’t even let on that she wrote the play or both girls will get in trouble. And Batty has befriended the new people next door—a toddler named Ben and his awfully nice widowed mom.
It’s full of surprises, this often laugh-out-loud book, but it feels comfortable, like those wonderful classics about resourceful sibs including Elizabeth Enright’s The Saturdays (Holt, 1998, c1941) and Eleanor Estes’s The Moffats (Harcourt, 2001, c1941), both miraculously still in print. The Penderwicks' English equivalent would be the Hilary McKay novels about the eccentric Casson family, including Saffy’s Angel (2002) and Permanent Rose (2005, both S & S).
Readers will find themselves wanting to spend the day chez Penderwick; luckily, the author is planning three more books in the series. Have your students write about the Penderwick they would most like to be friends with and why, or about the one who is most like themselves.
Then travel due and way west to meet the title character in Helen Frost’s Diamond Willow (Farrar, 2008, Gr 4-7). Willow lives with her parents, little sister, and six sled dogs in Old Fork, a place with no paved roads leading in or out of town, in interior Alaska. She's named after a stick her father found right before she was born. A diamond willow is a type of shrub that grows in the north. If you remove the bark and then sand and polish a diamond willow stick, it will reveal reddish-brown diamond patterns in the wood.
Now 12 years old and in middle school, Willow begs her mom to let her mush the dogs out to her grandparents' house by herself, and Mom finally says yes. The ride is easy. She even sees fox tracks in the new snow. Willow's half Athabascan, and she likes visiting with her grandparents, listening to them speaking Dinak'i and tell stories about the old days.
Coming home, though, she goes too fast down a hill and disaster strikes. The dogs run into a broken tree lying across the trail. Willow hears Roxy, her beloved dog, whimpering, and when she investigates, she sees that Roxy has collided with a branch and is bleeding from her eyes. She will probably go blind, may even have to be put down, and it is all Willow's fault.
That's only part of the plot of this lovely, thoughtful book. Its format, which is so special and unusual, will fascinate your students. Most of the story is narrated by Willow, with the print arranged in diamond-shaped prose poems. But there’s also a message, printed in bold in the center of each diamond, that reveals her innermost feelings. First read the page, and then look in the middle to delve into Willow’s heart, in a few spare words. “Dad loves these dogs as much as he loves me,” declares the first one.
Interspersed throughout the book are pages of regular text, which are chapters narrated by Willow's ancestors, including John, her great-great-grandfather. How is he still alive to witness her movements? Well, John is the red fox whose tracks she saw in the snow. A number of the animals are her ancestors, including Spruce Hen, Mouse, Chickadee, and Lynx; they watch from the forest, and they already know some of the secrets that Willow is about to learn. You might think this is a bit too ethereal, but that touch of magical realism adds to the mysterious and lyrical mood of the story. It’s comforting to think that family will always be there.
Students will want to write their own thought-filled diamond willow poems with a message like a jewel in the middle. Pair Diamond Willow with Kirkpatrick Hill’s evocative fiction books about Alaska, including Toughboy and Sister (1990), Winter Camp (1993), and The Year of Miss Agnes (2000, all S & S), the story of how Miss Agnes Sutterfield, an innovative and unforgettable teacher, transforms the lives of the children in the one-room schoolhouse of another remote little village in 1948.
Judy Freeman (www.JudyReadsBooks.com) is the author of The Winners Handbook: A Closer Look at Judy Freeman’s Top-Rated Children’s Books of 2008 (2009), and Once Upon a Time: Using Storytelling, Creative Drama, and Reader's Theater with Children in Grades PreK-6 (2007, both Libraries Unlimited). Her latest project is writing the children’s book reviews and other content for author James Patterson’s award-winning Web site: www.ReadKiddoRead.com.
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