The Penderwicks on Gardam Street by Jeanne BirdsallKnopf, 2008

In this sequel to The Penderwicks, summer vacation is finished and the Penderwick sisters are back in school. Their autumn is going along pleasingly…until their Aunt Claire visits them, and gives their father a letter from their mother, who had died several years before. The letter encourages Mr. Penderwick to start dating again, and the girls—and Mr. Penderwick himself—are none too pleased at the prospect of the disruption of their routines. So Rosalind, Jane, Skye, and Batty launch the Save-Daddy plan, which involves sending their father on a few horrible dates: so horrible, they hope, that he’ll be put off the idea altogether. But Mr. Penderwick has a plan of his own, and things turn out differently from how everyone (except Batty) thought they would. As a reader, the romance plotlines are pretty obvious—it’s clear who should end up with whom and seems silly that the characters themselves don’t figure it out sooner—but of course, that’s some of what’s nice about romantic plot conventions, knowing where things will end up and then watching them get there.