Penny Dreadful
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4.4 • 8 Ratings
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- $4.99
Publisher Description
The perfect book for girls and boys who look to find adventure and magic in surprising places!
What if you were really bored with your life? What would you wish for?
Penelope Grey wishes for something—anything!—interesting to happen, and here’s what she gets:
• Her father quits his job.
• Her family runs out of money.
• Her home becomes a pit of despair.
So Penelope makes another wish, and this time the Greys inherit a ramshackle old house in the middle of nowhere. Off they go, leaving the city and their problems behind them. Their new home is full of artists, tiny lions, unusual feasts, and true friends. Almost immediately, their lives are transformed. Penelope’s mother finds an unexpected job, her father discovers a hidden talent, and Penelope changes her name!
Penny’s new life feels too magical to be real, too real to be magic. And it may be too good to last . . . unless she can find a way to make magic work just one more time—if it even was magic.
Any Which Wall author Laurel Snyder introduces a quirky cast of characters as pleasantly strange as they are deeply real. Abigail Halpin adds to the charm with her distinctive line drawings.
Fans of Polly Horvath’s My One Hundred Adventures, Ingrid Law’s Savvy, and Jeanne Birdsall’s The Penderwicks will be enchanted by Laurel Snyder’s alternatively humorous and poignant look at small-town life and what it really takes to become a happy family.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Snyder's (Up and Down the Scratchy Mountains) coming-of-age novel addresses economic upheaval and building relationships from a refreshingly positive perspective. Ten-year-old Penelope Grey has a contagious appetite for adventure. She lives in a city mansion with kind but often absent parents, and although "Penelope knew she had nothing to complain about," she one day makes a wish for an "everything change," hoping to conjure up some of the magic that she reads about in her beloved books (Snyder plugs The Little Princess and The Penderwicks, among others). When her father spontaneously quits his job, the family can no longer afford their lifestyle and, coincidentally, are suddenly able to move into an inherited house in rural Thrush Junction, Tenn. There, Penelope encounters unusual neighbors, including scrappy Luella and ex-vaudevillian Down-Betty, all the while wondering if this was the change she was looking for. Snyder's characters are well-developed and endearing, and the author strikes an excellent balance between the reality of the Greys' financial straits and the quiet magic that everyday life has to offer. Ages 8 12.
