The Penderwicks

Blurb

The Penderwicks: A Summer Tale of Four Sisters, Two Rabbits, and a Very Interesting Boy is a children's novel by Jeanne Birdsall, published by Knopf in 2005. It won the annual U.S. National Book Award for Young People's Literature.
This was Birdsall's first book published and it inaugurated the "Penderwick sisters" series, whose third chronicle of five that Birdsall plans was published in 2011. Both A Summer Tale and its sequel The Penderwicks on Gardam Street were New York Times Best Sellers.
The novel was inspired by the kind of stories the author read when growing up, The National Book Award citation compares the novel to Louisa May Alcott's Little Women and E. Nesbit's The Story of the Treasure Seekers. The fictional setting is more modern than Alcott's or Nesbit's, although not clearly contemporary with Birdsall's writing.