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booksofwonder · 5 years

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Top picks of 2018 from our staff!

We asked our staff to pick their top 5 favorite books from 2018 and they delivered! Well, there was a lot of “ONLY FIVE?!?!?!” going around, but eventually stacks were gathered (spoiler: some are 6 books high. Booklover life is hard).

Here they are!

18th St store manager Elena’s picks:

A Pop-up Guide to Hogwarts by Matthew Reinhart

We Don’t Eat Our Classmates by Ryan T. Higgins

Bygone Badass Broads by Mackenzi Lee

Be Prepared by Vera Brosgol

Dear Rachel Maddow by Adrienne Kisner

18th St assistant manger TJ’s picks:

This is Kind of an Epic Love Story by Kheryn Callender

The Rabbit Listened by Cori Doerrfeld

The Brilliant Death by Amy Rose Capetta

The Serpent’s Secret by Sayantani DasGupta

Seeing Stars by Sara Gillingham

Dread Nation by Justina Ireland

YA Buyer & Events Coordinator Eileen’s picks:

Dry by Jarrod & Neal Shusterman

Furyborn by Claire Legrand/Sawkill Girls by Claire Legrand (choices are hard)

Unbroken edited by Marieke Nijkamp (w/ 12 other contributors!)

Anger is a Gift by Mark Oshiro

The Astonishing Color of After by Emily X.R. Pan

Seafire by Natalie C. Parker

18th St Bookseller Rayan’s picks:

Turning Pages by U.S. Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor

Mae Among the Stars by Roda Ahmed, illustrated by Stasia Burrington

Ocean Meets Sky by The Fan Brothers

Julian is a Mermaid by Jessica Love

Prince & Knight by Daniel Haack, illustrated by Stevie Lewis

18th St Bookseller Nadja’s picks:

Louisiana’s Way Home by Kate DiCamillo

The Truth As Told By Mason Buttle by Leslie Connor

In the Land of Happy Tears: Yiddish Tales for Modern Times: collected & edited by David Stromberg

The Right Hook of Devin Velma by Jake Burt

The Penderwicks at Last by Jeanne Birdsall

84th St Bookseller Cass’s Picks:

Chaotic Good by Whitney Gardner

The Spy with the Red Balloon by Katherine Locke

Fake Blood by Whitney Gardner (they really love Whitney)

Check Please by Ngozi Ukazu

Keeper of the Lost Cities: Flashback by Shannon Messenger

84th St Bookseller Clare’s picks:

National Parks of the U.S.A. by Kate Siber, illustrated by Chris Turnham

The Poet X by Elizabeth Acevedo (National Book Award winner!)

City of Ghosts by Victoria Schwab

Bygone Badass Broads by Mackenzi Lee (that’s 2 votes for this book!)

Drawn Together by Minh Le, illustrated by Dan Santat

84th St Bookseller Sarah’s picks:

How to Become a Knight (In Ten Easy Lessons) by Todd Tarpley, illustrated by Jenn Harney

Olympians: Hermes, Tales of the Trickster by George O’Connor

Thunderhead by Neal Shusterman

Archenemies by Marissa Meyer

Let Sleeping Dragons Lie by Garth Nix & Sean Williams

18th St Bookseller Monique’s picks:

Harriet Gets Carried Away by Jessie Sima

Ocean Meets Sky by The Fan Brothers (that’s 2 votes on this one!)

The Remember Balloons by Jessie Oliveros, illustrated by Dana Wulfekotte

The Day You Begin by Jaqueline Woodson, illustrated by Rafael Lopez

Crunch the Shy Dinosaur by Cirocco Dunlap, illustrated by Greg Pizzoli

84th St Assistant Manager Kellie’s picks:

Presto & Zesto in Limboland by Arthur Yorinks & Maurice Sendak

Making Friends by Kristen Gudsnuk

Rosie Revere & the Raucous Riveters by Andrea Beaty

Ogre Enchanted by Gail Carson Levine

What If It’s Us by Becky Albertalli & Adam Silvera

84th St Bookseller Rhianna’s picks:

Percy Jackson & the Olympians: The Lightning Thief, the Illustrated Edition by Rick Riordan, illustrated by John Rocco

Juno Valentine & the Magical Shoes by Eva Chen, illustrated by Derek Desierto

Rock What Ya Got by Samantha Berger, illustrated by Kerascoet

The Hazel Wood by Melissa Albert

The Prince & the Dressmaker by Jen Wang

18th St Keyholder Olivia’s picks:

Pride by Ibi Zoboi

Hurricane Child by Kheryn Callender

Burning Magic (A Shadow Magic Novel) by Joshua Khan

Furyborn by Claire Legrand (That’s 2 votes for this books!)

Can I Be Your Dog? by Troy Cummings

Dance of Thieves by Mary E. Pearson

What were your faves from 2018???

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writerly-ramblings · 6 years

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Thoughts on “The Penderwicks at Last”

All right, there’s been enough interest from the (so sadly tiny) group of Penderwicks readers on here, so here are my semi-coherent thoughts on the last book, At Last, because, as previously stated, I have Thoughts. Spoilers ahead for all the entire series.

I’m going to start by saying that I am not the intended audience for these books: I’m in my twenties. That being said, I’ve waited over a decade for The Penderwicks At Last, and I reread the entire series to prepare. I read the last one in a few hours, and ugly cried through the second half.

Fair warning: my parenthetical comments waged a territorial battle and won.

PROS:

Everyone gets a happy ending. I think, over time, I’ll feel less conflicted about At Last because, in the end, everyone is happy, and does it matter how they got there?

Skye, particularly, is so much happier. The events of the fourth book clearly had an impact, and Lydia has grown up with a much less fearful, hurting, angry, or traumatized Skye.

Batty’s memories of Arundel being mostly patched together from stories her family has told felt incredibly realistic to me, and I enjoyed watching her rediscover the estate.

Ben is great, and I’ve always loved the Penderwick children’s dedication to their chosen obsessions/careers, so I’m glad he’s got that. I also loved when he told Jeffrey he’d marry him, but not if he was broke. (The humor in these books!)

Rafael is still around. We don’t see him, but we know he’s still friends with Ben. Other Penderwick friends have fallen off the map between different books (Anna, Keiko, Molly, Mercedes), and it was good to see someone stick around.

I liked Wesley. He felt like a red-herring (I can’t be the only one who was desperately hoping Batty was going to decide she wanted to be with him after all), but he was a delightful character. He’s kind to Lydia and Alice, makes himself helpful around the house/with wedding prep, loves Hitch, and respects Batty’s boundaries. He’s a good person. And the mobiles!

Cagney’s family is adorable. And Skye teasing Rosalind about her childhood crush on Cagney is a dead-on sister thing to do.

Mr. Penderwick and Iantha are still very much in love, and still very much adorable and loving parents.

“Jeffrey, no one wants to marry you!” (Okay, this is was a laugh-or-you’ll-cry moment, but I did laugh!)

Also in the bittersweet category would be Mrs. Tifton’s talk with Jane in the carriage-house. We won’t talk about the fact that I really, really wanted Mrs. Tifton to be right. What we will talk about is Jane rage-sewing, being a good older sister, holding it together, and refusing to sully her honor (I love that Jane has maintained her bizarre approach to honor that includes even hypotheticals). Thinking about it, this scene mirrors the one with Skye and Mrs. Tifton in the first book (with Lydia standing in for Batty here), and I like that touch.

CONS:

A lot of the issues I had with At Last are really my own problems, not shortcomings in the book. One instance of that is how I felt about Lydia as a narrator. The first four books mature in tone as they go along, due to the seriousness of the issues facing the characters, making them compelling reading for someone older than the intended audience. I liked Lydia, but she felt much less mature than her sisters at similar ages, and wasn’t facing comparable difficulties. And she wasn’t nearly so interested, or involved, in her sisters’ lives as I would have liked. (Which is understandable, given the age gap, but frustrating as a reader who cares mainly about Rosalind, Skye, Jane, and Batty.)

Technology is weirdly handled? I’ve always liked the timeless quality of the previous books, and all the texting and general cell phone use threw me. (And, really, how many eleven-year-olds have access to cell phones and use them exclusively to text their brothers?)

Jane gave me a kind of dispirited, hollow feeling. She’s twenty-five and still hasn’t sat down and written a full novel. She has two abandoned books and one in the planning stages. I don’t mean I wanted her to be published, but it felt very flighty, especially for someone who’s been serious about writing since she was younger than ten. (I kind of wanted more of Jane in general, actually. How was college? How is she managing to keep a waitressing job she’s terrible at, and why wouldn’t she work in, I don’t know, a bookstore or library instead?)

This leads into my next, larger but vaguer upset: Everyone’s happy, but I was still dissatisfied. I know that most of the time life isn’t glamorous, but aside from Skye, the other sisters don’t seem to have done much? Rosalind has taken fifteen years to marry Tommy, Jane hasn’t finished even a draft of a novel, and it seems like Batty’s going to graduate college and start a music school in western MA (which is fine, but also, where are her years touring in Europe and her own career in music?). I don’t know. I think I just wanted to believe, for 256 pages, that adult life could be more exciting and adventurous, and live up to childhood expectations.

Honestly, I like Lydia, but she’s not why I wanted to read At Last. This goes back to me not being the target audience, but it’s the older four I care about, and I felt like frustratingly little was said about them. And I’ve read interviews with Jeanne Birdsall, where she talks about this book being the point she was writing toward, and I’m just having trouble wrapping my mind around the idea that, if this was the endgame, middle-grade novels were the best format for the story. (Am I biased here? Definitely. Did I love these books as a child and teenager? Without a doubt. Would I, right now, prefer to have read a literary fiction novel where the older sisters’ adult lives were given as much weight as their childhoods? I’d be all over that. Again, I acknowledge this as my own bias, not a shortcoming with the book.)

SKYE:

(Because, let’s be honest, this is where I fell apart.)

I’m so, so happy Skye is working on her doctorate. As someone else who didn’t want to date at seventeen because I wanted to “soak up the universe,” I appreciate the fact that she’s out there, doing just that. But it also made me so sad. Because her family loves her, so they put her on speaker phone during important family meetings, and they miss her when she’s gone, and Lydia doesn’t know her, as a person, the way her other sisters and Ben (sort of) do. And this is very much tied to my own life, as I look at likely moving to a different country, leaving behind parents I love and a whole host of younger siblings.

So I’m glad she has the life she spent her whole childhood wanting, but I also wish we’d gotten to see more of how she grew, and healed, and changed post-In Spring. Because the Skye we see in At Last isn’t the Skye from the other books, and that’s good, it means she’s less hurt (and also almost ten years older), but it also means I didn’t feel like I knew much about her anymore.

I have almost no thoughts on Dušek and agree with the opinion other people have voiced that he seemed to be there mostly to squash all doubt about Jeffrey. He seemed sweet, but I didn’t know, or care about, him. (And I think the lack of Skye contributed to this: I didn’t know her, so I didn’t feel invested in him.)

THAT ROMANCE:

I feel like noting that I’ve read Little Women more times than I can count, and I willfully ignored not only that, but also the blatant Penderwick-universe foreshadowing (like Batty saying Jeffrey could marry her, after he saves her from the bull all the way back in the first book). Because Birdsall did deviate from Little Women in other, large ways, for example: none of the sisters die. Did I suspect Jeffrey would end up with Batty? Yes. Did I fervently hope that he’d actually end up with Skye? Also yes. Does it make me seem incredibly shallow that this is what occupied a great deal of my brain for twelve years? Probably.

It’s worth pointing out that I’m a sucker for childhood friends who fall in love and get married (Anne and Gilbert, Meg and Calvin, Ella and Char, Miri and Peder, don’t get me started on FMA … I’ll cop to having a problem), but also that I’ve never been bothered by Laurie and Amy. They make sense together, and Jo’s opposition to Laurie is based on legitimate concerns that just don’t exist for Skye and Jeffrey, thanks both to the fact that they live in the twenty-first century, and that Jeffrey doesn’t have Laurie’s hot-headed argumentative steak, stubbornness, or laziness.

And it’s not necessarily that I think Batty and Jeffrey wouldn’t be good together (other than the fact that, unlike Skye, Batty did, at least while younger, consider him not an “honorary Penderwick” but an “honorary brother”), but we never get an explanation for how Jeffrey feels about Skye now, or how/when he got over her (because, when you think about it, that must have been a Process. According to Jane, circa In Spring, Jeffrey’s been in some form of adoration/love with Skye since a few weeks before he turned eleven, and at least until he was eighteen, which is seven years. He’s twenty-five in At Last, which means, in the span of time the series covers, he’s spent just as much time in love with Skye as not. And seven years is a long time - more than a quarter of his life. And that’s a conservative estimate, since the last we hear of this is that he and Skye fight about this at his graduation, but that likely wasn’t the exact moment he fell out of love with her. And the jump from Skye to Batty is more difficult to swallow, given all of this, than Jeffrey going on to marry a non-Penderwick. Though, to Jeffrey’s credit, it’s heavily implied he’s going to marry Batty, but this is conveyed strictly through Jane; he’s not out there himself, desperately trying to win nineteen-year-old Batty’s affection in order to replace her sister).

Mostly, while reading, I felt misled, because if there was creeping Batty/Jeffrey foreshadowing, the Skye/Jeffrey foreshadowing was burst-into-your-music-room-and-tell-you-off strong. Jeffrey asks Skye if she ever thinks about them getting married all the way back in the third book. And Skye never shows similar inclinations toward romance, but the whole plot of In Spring makes it seem like this is due to being traumatized by the circumstances of her mother’s death. She isn’t interested in romance as a teenager, but she does love Jeffrey as a friend, and since the purpose of the events of In Spring is to make her less terrified of relationships, and because it’s Jeffrey she originally opens up to about this, there’s a lot, thematically, implied here. (I feel like the argument at Jeffrey’s graduation is maybe meant to show that she’s never going to be interested, but given both that she states that she wants to prioritize college over romance, and that the fight happens off-stage and is only summarized, this isn’t really clear.)

I do feel like this is where Little Women has the advantage: Jo doesn’t love Laurie, and she also has practical reasons why marriage wouldn’t work for them. We never see that from Skye. We see her afraid of love, and fighting with external factors, but we never actually see her not loving Jeffrey for reasons that are related to him.

So I think my main issue here is that their relationship felt very unresolved. Are they even still good friends? And why was it necessary for Jeffrey to fall in love with her in the first place? The fraught conversation in In Spring could just as easily have been Jeffrey or Jane pressing Skye about why she wouldn’t date Pearson.

(Skye and Jeffrey are previously so earnest, and At Last feels like the death of a friendship. Not in a final, we’ll-never-speak-again way, but in a quieter way that makes me think they haven’t really been close since Skye left for college, and that just makes me sad. Where are my “Friends forever” as sworn by the Penderwick Family Honor? Because, yes, yes, everyone grows up, but I didn’t want them to grow apart.)

IN CONCLUSION:

Has anyone actually made it this far down? Was a dissertation called for? Am I a little obsessive/ridiculous/insane?

What might not have come across, but what I do strongly feel, is that At Last is a good read. Lydia’s likable, the return to Arundel is well done, there are a lot of sweet, funny scenes. And none of my criticism really is to do with the material. My disappointment stems almost completely from my own expectations. Will I go on to reread the first four books and then pretend I’ve misplaced the fifth (while imagining it’s told from Rosalind, Skye, Jane, and Batty’s perspectives; and, possibly, that it has a different ending)? Who knows. Maybe, once I’ve sat with the fifth book for a bit longer I’ll like it more. Maybe it doesn’t matter. Maybe those twelve years when I speculated about what would happen in At Last, that decade that the characters kept me company, matters more than whether or not I liked the end.

#the penderwicks #my ramblings #sort of conflicted posting this because i really do believe in the book as a book it just didn't conform to my expectations #and that feels like a very selfish (and anti-literary) view to take #but it's also been a long time since i was this invested in characters while reading #(the downside to literary fiction i guess is that i tend to be more critical of style and story and iffy on the characters #whereas here all i wanted was more of the characters)#anyway #ignore my ranting #(also: i'm sorry if the format still doesn't work? i'm having difficulties)

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izzielizzie · 2 years

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heyo ok so u have me curious. how do you think the other penderwicks siblings should have grown up (besides jane). i agree with your assessment of her being aged the most accurately, but im curious to know what you think should have happened with the others

hi!!! let me preface this by saying that seeing you in my notifications always makes me so happy!!

Rosalind

Rosy should be a teacher!!! I will not settle for anything else. She's so good with kids and she'd love it so much. I can imagine her teaching elementary school students because she gets to teach every subject so she doesn't have to choose. I always pictured Rosalind to be the type of girl who grows up in a small town and then goes away to some fancy college and then comes back to raise her family in the house she was raised in and then everyone tells her kids stuff like "well I remember your mother doing the same thing" at random moments at it makes Rosy laugh. She'd be the kind of person who's super involved in the community: she'd manage PTA bake sales and run the community garden and she'd make sure all the fields and parks were clean. Honestly she'd be the unofficial mayor. People would ask her to run but she never would.

Skye

I liked that Skye studied the stars in California. Yes good, correct. A husband was bad though. Because obviously she'd have a girlfriend that she lives with in an apartment and I like the idea of the gf doing something in the humanities, like history or English. Oh! Or she'd be an actress! I feel like Skye would be a professor? I know that I headcanon Rosy as a teacher too but Skye would be a different teacher, one who teaches college students and is really funny and swears in class and has deadpan reactions and all the students clamor to get a seat in her class. At some point she'd get married, but it would be a total surprise. She'd come home for Christmas and she'd call her partner "my wife" and the entire family would be shocked and excited and they'd be so happy for her. She wouldn't have kids but she's the family's Cool Aunt™. She takes a lot of inspiration from Aunt Claire.

Batty

Batty is harder. I feel like she'd wander around for a while. Maybe she'd work at a theatre playing live music. Maybe she'd tour with Jeffrey. Honestly she does a lot of random things in her mid-to-late twenties and the entire time she'd write music in her free time. Eventually, when Ben becomes a really famous director, he starts to write his own movies, and what do you need with movies? Yep. Music. Batty's a really big family person so it makes sense that she'd end up working with her younger brother. She lives in a loft with Keiko and they'd steadily deny being in love but it's also really obvious and it's like a romcom it takes forever for them to realize they like each other. They don't get married, marriage isn't really for them. But they do adopt like,,, five dogs.

And, why not, let's do some other characters too

Ben

Ben and Rafael are dating!!! They are in love!!! And Ben becomes a famous director bc one of his videos where he films Raphael doing something stupid goes viral and so people watch his other videos and some fancy director guy realizes that Ben's actually pretty good and offers him an internship opportunity and then somehow Ben charms himself into being famous (and he also works really hard but literally no one can say no to him). He and Raphael get married and it's a super chaotic wedding and they spend the rest of their lives living in an apartment and it's always a mess and they're a lot of laughter.

Tommy

Tommy is a pilot and he gets to speak a billion languages because I really loved that he wanted to be a pilot when he was in middle school it really suits him.

Jeffrey

He becomes a famous jazz player and spends all his time touring Europe or hanging with the Penderwicks and flirting with Jane. (I refuse to let go of Jane/Jeffrey I just love them so much!!!)

Nick

Nick retires from the army and becomes a football coach in Cameron and his kids are raised across the street from Rosy and Tommy's kids.

#idk why but lydia's incapable of growing in my mind so she's not on the list #rosalind penderwick #skye penderwick #batty penderwick #ben aaronson penderwick #tommy geiger #jeffrey tifton mcgrath #nick geiger #the penderwicks

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izzielizzie · 3 years

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Any Penderwicks headcanons you could spare?

of course!

Rosalind wants to be a professional baker for practically all of her life until she goes to college and volunteers at a farm with some of her friends and she falls in love

i can just imagine her talking about her career change with such enthusiasm

"plants are great Tommy! they're like kids that don't talk back or demand food! And I can bake with them! and they're so pretty especially flowers! flowers are so pretty! and i like gardening who doesn't? no wonder Dad's a botanist!!!"

honestly she's just so happy

Mr. Penderwick is happy too because he loves plants and now he talk about them without people rolling their eyes at him

although Rosy is very against all the pressed plants in his office

okay i feel like this is generally accepted in the fandom but no Penderwick sibling is straight

Rosy? bi. no one is that obsessed with their best friend Anna

Skye? oh Skye's a lesbian and she has a very dramatic enemies-to-friends-to-lovers thing going on with Melissa and she's also ace

Jane? well no one really knows her orientation not even her but "love is a vibe guys if someone has the vibe then i'm in love"

(cue Skye rolling her eyes in the background)

Batty is also ace and she's also hopelessly in love with Keiko

Ben and Rafael have been in love since the first grade and they can be found in their apartment making movies, speaking Klingon, and adopting dogs

and Lydia and Alice are being bad influences together for all of eternity

Jane spends a year during college studying literature in the UK and she comes back with the fakest British accent ever

she actually keeps up the charade for a like a solid month until Skye laughs at her so hard she just gives up

no one is allowed to talk about it

Batty and Jeffrey put on concerts every vacation

Rosalind tried to teach Lydia how to bake once

and only once

Nick is still, to this day, trying to find Batty her sport

Under Penderwick Family Honor, no one is allowed to tell Nick that Batty joined the tennis team in high school with Keiko

this leads to a lot of hilarity whenever Nick's home

someone always trips up and almost talks about it and Batty just dramatically whips around and glares at them

she and Skye are very good at glaring

Skye is always on the roof of their garage

Iantha and Mr. Penderwick know but she hasn't died yet so they let her be

when Aunt Claire got married Skye almost refused to be in the wedding because of the past flower trauma at her uncle Gordan's wedding

Hoover the dog gets a very special shout out at Claire and Turron's wedding because without him Claire wouldn't have broken her ankle and she and Turron wouldn't have fallen in love

when Keiko and Batty get married they joke about only inviting people's pets and leaving the people at home

Ben and Rafael are so upset that Cameron High School doesn't actually teach Klingon that they start a protest

no one actually goes but that doesn't stop them

they become such a nuisance that the principle - sick of the Penderwicks and their hijinks after the first four and already terrified of the sixth one - just lets them teach themselves the language in the back of the library during study hall

Lydia and Jack become best friends and Alice hates it but also loves it

i actually can't tell if i like Jack/Lydia or Alice/Lydia better

whatever either way that trio is iconic

after Skye moves to California Jeffrey and Jane grow closer

idk why i ship them so much but i really do

maybe it's because Jeffrey wrote music for her

he still does

a lot

the Penderwicks never cease to be chaotic and i miss them

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