Penderwicks Under the Influence

Page 1 of Louisa May Alcott's Little Women: “‘Christmas won't be Christmas without any presents,’ grumbled Jo, lying on the rug.”

Page 1 of Jeanne Birdsall’s The Penderwicks: “...what is summer without a trip to somewhere special?”

And thus begins the story of four sisters, Meg, Jo, Beth, and Amy, who live with their mother--or rather the story of Rosalind, Skye, Jane, and Batty, along with their father.

They meet a delightful and rich boy next door, Laurie Jeffrey, and deal with the difficulties of being so poor that they can only have a large warm house and lots of books and clothes but not a huge house with loyal servants like Laurie Jeffrey.

As you might guess, I found it impossible not to think of Alcott's March sisters when reading The Penderwicks. The oldest of the four girls is loving, responsible Rosalind instead of loving, responsible Meg. At bottom is baby Batty, who dreams of marrying the boy next door, instead of Amy, who eventually does. In the middle, noble dying Beth isn't an acceptable role model in today's culture, so there's no equivalent to her. Instead, Jo has been split into two sisters: Skye gets the spit-in-their-eye spunk, and Jane gets the novelistic ambitions.

Of course, Birdsall hasn't been shy about acknowledging her influences. The book itself name-checks Alcott, Patricia MacLachlan, E. Nesbit's Bastables, Edward Eager, and a certain tornado in Kansas. The author went further in this interview with Little Willow:

When I was 10 or so, I learned that Edward Eager wrote his wonderful set of books (Half Magic, Knight's Castle, Magic by the Lake, etc.) partly in tribute to the great E. Nesbit (Five Children and It, The Enchanted Castle, The Adventures of the Treasure Seekers, etc.). Since I loved these authors, I vowed that, when I grew up, I would try to write books that would be tributes to both of them. And though I didn't start writing until I was very grown up (in my 40s), I did go back to Eager and Nesbit for inspiration, with a lot of Louisa May Alcott and some Frances Hodgson Burnett thrown in, plus a bunch of others.

On her website Birdsall says:

I also borrow from other books, especially the ones I loved best when I was young. The idea of four sisters came from Little Women. Batty’s adventure with the bull came from Emily of New Moon. There are other examples, but that would be giving too much away!

Paradoxically, that would be giving away what the book has already borrowed.

Reviewers noted the many influences on The Penderwicks. Some asked whether the book holds more appeal for adults who recall reading those books than for kids. For example, here's the Common Sense review:

it's a book calculated to warm the hearts of aging Boomers, and remind them of the books they read when they were kids. Whether it will warm the hearts of many of today's children remains to be seen. It will be loved by the kind of kids, if there are any left, who go into a trance over Little Women, The Moffats, and others...

In an interview with Publishers Weekly, Birdsall herself said: “the independents had really gotten behind it. It was a book they could hand to every adult who walked in, needing a book for a child.” And of course it won the National Book Award for Young People's Literature.

The Penderwicks struck me as the literary equivalent of a Freddie Bartholomew movie, beloved of aunts everywhere. Of course, some young readers enjoy it very much as well. But many of its most enthusiastic fans seem to be those adults, "needing a book for a child" that reminded them of the books they remembered from childhood.

In particular, I wonder how The Penderwicks got such a buoyant critical reception when other books have been criticized for borrowing too much. I Googled the words "derivative" and "Eragon" and came up with 23,200 hits; in fact, there are 200 hits for "Eragon" and "hopelessly derivative" alone. Yet when I Googled "derivative" and "Penderwicks," I found just over 100 webpages.

Is that difference because Birdsall was transparent about her influences, thus making The Penderwicks an homage rather than an imitation? Because her prose style is quite good? Because she personally didn't seem so callow as teen-aged author Christopher Paolini? Because he had more sales and a movie deal, and thus became a larger target? Or because Birdsall chose to replicate what's perceived as a higher class of literature, particularly beloved for children's-book reviewers?