Terrible, Horrible Edie is the third in E.C. Spykman’s quartet of children’s books about the Cares family, but it works as a standalone—which is good, because the other three books are out of print. This was a delightful read though: I love it in the same way I love Elizabeth Enright’s “Melendy” books or Jeanne Birdsall’s “Penderwicks” series.
At the start of the book (which was published in 1960 but is set in the 1910s), the Cares family is packing up to go to the beach for the summer. There are six kids, ranging in age from three to eighteen, plus household staff, plus a bunch of animals (a bird, a goat, a monkey, and two dogs), so it’s quite a production. Ten-year-old Edie is traveling in one of the family’s two cars with her sixteen-year-old brother, Hubert, at the wheel, and their trip from inland Massachusetts to the coast is a wild ride in more ways than one.
This sets the tone for a summer full of adventure: Edie’s father and stepmom are off to Europe, while the kids will be staying at their aunt’s beach house with a cook, a maid, another kitchen helper, and a caretaker to look after them. Edie, who’s six years younger than her youngest older sibling, and five years older than her oldest half-sibling, is often too young for whatever the older kids want to do, but too old to be bothered spending time with the younger ones. So she often has to amuse herself, which she does by getting into various adventures and more than a few scrapes. She’s a plucky kid, and a good sailor, though she’s also impulsive and sometimes lacking in manners, and reading about her summer is always entertaining.
I like how this book manages to be full of action and humor and also manages to capture the feeling of a summer vacation by the water. There are so many great descriptive passages about Edie’s aunt’s house, like this: “On a good day all the big open high-ceilinged rooms were filled with a kind of sunny air that smelled of tea and pine needles and, on bad days, when everything was shut up, you were shut in with fog and the smell of a ship” (52). Or this:
Waking up at Aunt Louise’s was almost always a good sensation, no matter what kind of day it might be, because of the sounds that the wind, light or strong, brought in before your eyes were even open. There was particularly the clock chunk of boats and the chuck, chuck, chuck of Captain Grannet’s lobster launch setting out steadily and firmly to visit the pots. These made you part of everything to do with salt water, so that you saw the wet piles of the wharfs at low tide, barnacles, mud flats or the brimming harbor, quahogs under boulders, scurrying fiddler crabs, and screaming gulls. (148)
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