While vacationing with their widowed father in the Berkshire Mountains, four lovable sisters, ages four through twelve, share adventures with a local boy, much to the dismay of his snobbish mother.

The Penderwick sisters are home on Gardam Street and ready for an adventure! But the adventure they get isn't quite what they had in mind. Mr. Penderwick's sister has decided it's time for him to start dating-- and the girls know that can only mean one thing: disaster. Enter the Save-Daddy Plan-- a plot so brilliant, so bold, so funny, that only the Penderwick girls could have come up with it!

When an inkblot, who can write, listen, learn, and draw, jumps out of Mr. Rylance's sketchbook, Ethan believes he may be the answer to their problems and names him Inkling.

"Sometimes life isn't a piece of cake ... When Jingwen moves to a new country, he feels like he's landed on Mars. School is torture, making friends is impossible since he doesn't speak English, and he's often stuck looking after his (extremely irritating) little brother, Yanghao. To distract himself from the loneliness, Jingwen daydreams about making all the cakes on the menu of Pie in the Sky, the bakery his father had planned to open before he unexpectedly...

Told in two voices, eleven-year-olds Mimi, who is visiting her wealthy grandparents in Karachi, Pakistan, for the first time and Sakina, daughter of the grandparents' cook, form an unexpected friendship.--

When she suspects that her father has a girlfriend, Melody and her best friend are determined to figure out who it is and why it is a secret.

To the constant disappointment of his mother and his teachers, Joey has trouble paying attention or controlling his mood swings when his prescription medications wear off and he starts getting worked up and acting wired.

Discovering a book of Langston Hughes' poetry in the library helps Langston cope with the loss of his mother, relocating from Alabama to Chicago as part of the Great Migration, and being bullied.

As spring arrives on Gardam Street, there are surprises in store for each Penderwick, from neighbour Nick Geiger's expected return from the war to Batty's new dog-walking business, but her plans to use her profits to surprise her family on her eleventh birthday go astray. Includes excerpt from author's final book in the same series, "The Penderwicks at last" at the end of the book.

"Following a tragedy that further alters the course of her life, twelve-year-old Lucy Everhart decides to continue the shark research her marine biologist mother left unfinished when she died years earlier"--