This final installment in the Penderwick saga ends with a wedding, another wedding, and a hint at future wedding possibilities. The Penderwick clan gather back where it all started at Arundell from far and wide, Skye flying in from California, the others driving in from closer points east, west, north, and south. Jeffery is coming from Germany to manage the music for the wedding, and Cagney and his wife live on the premises at Arundell as caretakers. So all the old crew is back for this last hoorah—as well as some new characters.

Ten year old Lydia Penderwick, in the Penderwick tradition of the first four books about this family, is both innocent and precocious at the same time. Lydia, who loves to dance and who almost likes everybody she meets (with only a few exceptions), is a joy and a delight as she dances through the chaos of wedding preparations and a new friendship with Cagney’s daughter, Alice. The girls encounter spiders, ghosts, and the fearsome Mrs. Tifton—all with the same courage and adventurous spirit that made the other Penderwick children so much fun to read about in the other books in the series.

I must say that there were a couple of jarring notes to the whole book, which is mostly a paean to love and marriage and and family and friendship. Lydia’s friend, Alice, has a brother who spends most of the book in Canada, visiting relatives. Alice, however, is jealous of her brother’s trip to Canada and spends a great deal of time texting him competitive photos and challenges as to who is having the best summer vacation. I guess it’s realistic, but not as much fun as the feisty but good-natured family teasing and joking and encouraging that goes on between the Penderwick siblings. Then, Skye’s and Jane’s attitudes about marriage are aired, and I just wanted to tell them to grow up. Skye insists that “marriage is an outmoded social contract,” but her actions seem to belie her words. And Jane says she’s too busy becoming a novelist to think about marriage or boyfriends, as if one precludes the other. It all feels so twenty-first century and so-so feminist and liberated and pretentious. In a book that’s celebrating marriage, it’s out of place.

However, those are minor false notes in a book that’s mostly a lovely finale to the Penderwick symphony. If you haven’t read the first four books in the series, I would suggest that you begin at the beginning. You’ll appreciate it more that way. And if you enjoy the first book, do read through to the end of The Penderwicks at Last.

The other Penderwick books:
The Penderwicks: A Summer Tale of Four Sisters, Two Rabbits, and a Very Interesting Boy
The Penderwicks on Gardam Street
The Penderwicks at Point Mouette
The Penderwicks in Spring

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This book may be nominated for a Cybils Award, but the views expressed here are strictly my own and do not reflect or determine the judging panel’s opinions.

This new historical fiction novel by Newbery Award-winning writer Christopher Paul Curtis started out to be another story about the lives of the fugitives who settled in Buxton, Canada, a haven for people who had escaped slavery in the southern United States just before the Civil War. As Mr. Curtis tells it, the genesis of the story was a newspaper cutting about the attempted kidnapping of a young African American boy from his home in Canada. The book was supposed to be about this boy and about a poor white boy named Charlie Bobo. Curtis writes: “I’d hoped to explore how much each was a product of his own environment and times, as well as try and analyze what goes into making a human being do something courageous.”

“But once I started pinning Little Charlie to the page, once I got to know his voice and personality, I knew this was his book. Sylvanus was going to have to wait.”

First of all, the negatives about this middle grade fiction book:

~The book is written in Little Charlie’s voice, and Charlie speaks Southern cracker: “Cap’n” instead of Captain, “com-fitting” instead of comfort, “scairt” instead of scared. The dialect helps give Charlie a personality and a distinctive point of view, but it could be distracting and difficult for younger readers. It was a bit distracting for me, until I got used to it.

~There is some mild cursing (he– and da–, mostly). It’s entirely in character for the people who do so to curse, and in fact there are very few curse words in the book, probably much fewer than would realistically be called for in these characters. However, they are there.

~The slave-catcher, Cap’n Buck, is an evil and violent man. And some of that evil and violence makes it into the book in fairly graphic descriptions of gun violence, mob violence, something called “cat-hauling”, and just general violent capture and mistreatment of people who have escaped from enslavement. It’s not gratuitous, nor is it described as graphically as it could have been, but it’s ugly.

The positives:

~The plot moves along well, and the story kept me absorbed. Although I rather expected everything to turn out well in the end, I wasn’t entirely sure if or how that would happen. The events in the story were believable to me, and Charlie was a

~Mr. Curtis is a good writer, and I did manage to get used to the dialect and the misspelled words used to indicate that dialect (turrible and chirren and rep-a-tation). It all sounded authentic in my head, and eventually it helped me to stay in the story and understand the characters.

~The evolution of Charlie’s character and attitudes was realistic as well as hopeful. Charlie doesn’t become a raging abolitionist, but he does begin to see that black people are people, too, just like him—or at least kind of like him. The book portrays the evils and the violence of the slave economy, but it also shows the “points of light” that eventually shone out to eradicate that evil.

Read this novel along with Curtis’s other Buxton novels, Elijah of Buxton and The Madman of Piney Woods, to get a rounded picture of the lives of ante-bellum African Americans, both enslaved and escaped from slavery. And in this third book about Buxton, get a snapshot of where the prejudiced and hateful attitudes and actions that sustained slavery for so long may have originated and how they were perpetuated.

Amazon Affiliate. If you click on a book cover here to go to Amazon and buy something, I receive a very small percentage of the purchase price.
This book may be nominated for a Cybils Award, but the views expressed here are strictly my own and do not reflect or determine the judging panel’s opinions.