Books like Elizabeth Enright

The four Penderwick sisters are as sharply distinguished as the Melendys: practical Rosalind, combustible Skye, dreamy Jane, and watchful little Batty. During a summer in a rented cottage, their games, quarrels, loyalties, and encounters with the neighboring estate accumulate into something richer than a string of escapades.

Birdsall shares Enright’s rare respect for family life as both comedy and moral education. The children have real freedom; mistakes matter without becoming grim; and the adults can be foolish, admirable, or both. Winner of the National Book Award for Young People’s Literature, this is the modern family novel most likely to give a Melendy reader the delighted feeling of discovering not substitutes, but new friends.

Estes makes the smallest domestic event—losing a nickel, meeting a stranger, seeing a sign appear outside the family’s yellow house—feel charged with possibility. Janey Moffat’s world is less polished than the Melendys’, but it has the same abundance: siblings with private temperaments, a loving household under gentle pressure, and a town that children can explore on their own terms.

The comedy is wonderfully exact, especially about embarrassment and the strange logic of childhood, while the warmth never turns sugary. Estes became one of the defining American children’s novelists of the twentieth century because she understood that security and uncertainty can inhabit the same kitchen. Readers who cherish Enright’s quiet emotional intelligence should not miss its equally tender, humbler counterpart.

For the more unruly side of Melendy family life, meet the four Conroy sisters, dispatched to stay with their formidable grandmother and horrified to discover a house almost entirely without books. McKay’s sisters bicker, scheme, misinterpret adults, and close ranks with exhilarating speed. Their affection is never announced sentimentally; it emerges through insults, alliances, and reflexive loyalty.

McKay writes dialogue with a comic snap few family novelists can match, yet she also sees how children mythologize themselves and how families survive each member’s magnificent awkwardness. The novel won the Guardian Children’s Fiction Prize, an award judged by fellow writers, and it deserves its passionate readership. It is sharper-edged than The Saturdays, but animated by the same faith that siblings can make a complete and captivating civilization.