The Penderwicks: A Summer Tale of Four Sisters, Two Rabbits, and a Very Interesting Boy by Jeanne BirdsallYearling, 2007 (originally Knopf, 2005)

This is one of those charming summery kids’ books where a family goes on vacation and has adventures: the ordinary-life kind, not the magical kind. The Cape Cod summer house where the Penderwicks usually go has just been sold, so, instead, the four girls, their father, and their dog end up at a new summer destination, a cottage in the Berkshires. (The cottage, it turns out, is on the grounds of a mansion with an uptight owner who has a friendly son, a kind housekeeper, and a cute gardener with pet rabbits.) The four Penderwick sisters are each, sort of, of a type, though not annoyingly so: Rosalind is the oldest and therefore the responsible one; she’s also domestic (likes baking, likes watching littler kids, likes holding babies): I found her the least interesting of the sisters. The middle kids, Skye and Jane, are both smart and both good at soccer, though Jane’s the bookish romantic writer, while Skye is unsentimental and all about science and math. The youngest, Batty, is my favorite: she’s shy, wears butterfly wings, befriends the gardener’s bunnies, and amuses herself by playing vampires and astronauts and other games in the backyard with Hound, the dog. Over the course of their three weeks in the Berkshires, the sisters befriend Jeffrey, who lives in the mansion, have run-ins with his mother, and help to change things for the better. The narration is somewhat old-fashioned, but it’s mostly sweet rather than grating, and as soon as I finished this book, I wanted to start the sequel.