The Penderwicks: a Summer Tale of Four Sisters, Two Rabbits, and a Very Interesting Boy (by Jeanne Birdsall)

But Mrs. Tifton, supported by her equally mean and stuck-up beau Dexter Dupree, doesn't approve of the Penderwick girls or their friendship with her son. After a miserable and disastrous birthday party for Jeffrey, they overhear his mom and Dupree planning to marry and send Jeffrey away to military school. Gentle, artistic Jeffrey is horrified, and when his mother won't listen to his pleas, he plans to run away.

THE PENDERWICKS is a book calculated to warm the hearts of aging baby 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 the like. It's a pleasant story, enjoyable in a slow-moving, old-fashioned way, about children enjoying a summer of outdoor play.

But winning the National Book Award for Young People's Literature makes its faults stand out: stereotyped characters; emotional flatness; and an ending in which the best-case scenario is for Jeffrey to go off to boarding school at the ripe old age of 11 so that his mom can marry the odious Dupree without being encumbered by an inconvenient child. Not quite the old-fashioned values you'd expect from an old-fashioned book, but a modestly enjoyable read nonetheless.