49 pages • 1-hour read
The Penderwicks on Gardam Street
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Chapters 6-11Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 6 Summary: “The Save-Daddy Plan”
The day after her father’s blind date, Rosalind tries to think of a way to save him from “the burden of dating” altogether (71). Tommy interrupts her plotting and invites her to run some training drills with him. She declines, and they get into an argument because he’s bitter about her crush on Cagney, a boy she met that summer. Despite his jealousy, Rosalind doesn’t realize that Tommy has feelings for her.
Aunt Claire leaves with a promise to check in about Martin’s dating progress in a few weeks. After she drives off, Martin suggests abandoning the whole idea, but Jane reminds him that he promised to try. Rosalind calls a MOPS, a Meeting of Penderwick Sisters, and the girls gather at a fallen tree in Quigley Woods. Skye suggests that they find three more dates that their father will find torturous, allowing him to fulfill his promise while ensuring that he never wants to date again. Skye opposes her own plan because it seems unkind, but her sisters outvote her. Batty thinks that Martin should try dating Iantha, but Rosalind reminds him that they’re trying to find people he would strongly dislike.
Chapter 7 Summary: “A Skating Coach and an Orange Cat”
After school the following day, Rosalind asks Anna to help her and her sisters brainstorm potential awful dates for their father. She suggests that they set Martin up with her ice-skating coach, Lara, who never reads and wears a rabbit-fur coat. To facilitate the adults’ meeting, Anna asks Martin to pick her up from her ice-skating lesson that evening, claiming that her mother has to work late.
Jane struggles to write an essay about how science has changed people’s lives, and Skye struggles to write a play about the Aztecs, so Skye suggests that they complete each other’s assignments. After writing an essay about antibiotics, Skye climbs onto the roof, where she meets the Aaronsons’ large orange cat, Asimov.
Perturbed, Martin returns home from picking up Anna and announces that he has a date with Lara, who invited him to a Bach concert. The girls behave suspiciously, but Martin dismisses his doubts, saying, “What a distrustful old father I’ve become” (90). The sisters are filled with guilt, but Rosalind urges them not to abandon the Save-Daddy Plan.
Chapter 8 Summary: “Funty and the Bug Man”
The narrative moves forward to the day of Martin’s date with Lara. Rosalind snaps at Batty for being noisy, leading the four-year-old to cry and go into the yard with Hound. She overhears Iantha playing with Ben next door and thinks the woman has “a truly extra nice voice” (94). Jane asks Batty to help her act out Sisters and Sacrifice, the play she’s writing about the Aztecs. The four-year-old’s theatrics give Jane the idea of having the priest be struck by lightning before he can cut out the heart of Rainbow, one of the titular sisters and the play’s heroine.
After Jane goes back inside to continue working on the script, Batty decides to play a game called ‘going on a date.’ She plays her father and assigns her stuffed elephant, Funty, the role of Lara. Batty attaches Hound’s collar to her wagon so that he can pull her and Funty around, but the dog becomes too excited and drags the wagon into the street. Batty is almost hit by a car, but the driver stops just in time. Batty runs away in fright because he’s wearing “a hat pulled way down and also these big black sunglasses” (101). Batty is certain that the Bug Man, as she calls him, is not a nice person, and she resolves to remain vigilant in case he returns to Gardam Street.
Chapter 9 Summary: “Passes and Pizza”
Rosalind tries to encourage Martin as he anxiously prepares for his date with Lara. When his eldest daughter compliments his hideous tie, the professor, who tends to speak in Latin, replies, “Mendax, mendax, bracae tuae conflagrant” (105), which means ‘Liar, liar, your pants are on fire.’ Rosalind grows upset when she discovers that her father asked Tommy’s older brother, Nick, to babysit her and her sisters, and she storms off to her room. While Jane and Batty start running football drills with Nick and Tommy, Skye talks to Rosalind and persuades her to join the others.
Asimov interrupts the drills, and Skye brings the cat back to the Aaronsons. Sensing that Iantha is lonely, Skye invites her and Ben to join the Penderwick sisters and the Geiger brothers for dinner. Soon, the Penderwicks’ kitchen is “full of happy noise” as the sisters play and converse with their guests (117). Martin returns home early and in a foul mood because Lara talked over the orchestra. He and Iantha behave shyly towards one another, but he walks her and Ben home. Nick and Tommy leave as well. The four sisters feel guilty for subjecting their father to another ghastly date, but they remain determined to see the Save-Daddy Plan through to its conclusion.
Chapter 10 Summary: “Reversals”
A week goes by without any further developments in the Save-Daddy Plan because the sisters are busy enjoying the start of autumn weather, playing with Ben, exploring Quigley Woods’ creek with Tommy, watching for the return of the Bug Man, and building a miniature catapult to toss treats to Hound.
Aunt Claire calls and tells Rosalind that she’s coming to visit the next day to check on Martin’s progress and arrange a blind date with a funny, intelligent high school Latin teacher. Rosalind gathers her sisters and Anna for an emergency meeting, but Martin returns home from teacher conferences before they’ve settled on a plan of action. Martin reports that his middle daughters’ teachers are thrilled with the report on antibiotics that Jane turned in and the play about Aztecs that Skye turned in. In fact, the play has been chosen for the school’s Sixth Grade Performance Night. Skye is filled with guilt because Jane wrote the play, but she decides not to reveal the truth in case they decide to swap more assignments in the future. To his daughters’ shock, Martin reveals that he won’t be going on a date with the Latin teacher because he’s arranged a date for himself with a woman named Marianne Dashwood, whom he met recently: “I thought she was interesting and decided I’d like to spend some time with her. Nothing very dramatic” (131). Rosalind is devastated by this announcement.
Chapter 11 Summary: “Clues”
Rosalind is so anxious about Martin’s date with Marianne that she goes to Anna’s house instead of welcoming Aunt Claire with a freshly baked dessert like she usually does. Martin leaves for his date “dressed in a very un-datelike manner” and in such a hurry that he forgets to hug his daughters goodbye (133). Tommy stops by in search of Rosalind, and he spends an enjoyable evening playing Clue with Aunt Claire and the three youngest Penderwicks.
When Rosalind comes home, Tommy tells her that an eighth-grader named Trilby Ramirez asked him to go to the Autumn Extravaganza with her, but hints that he would rather go to the dance with Rosalind. Still irritated and stressed about her father, Rosalind doesn’t understand what he’s suggesting and bids the boy good night. Although she’s exhausted, she checks on Batty and makes sure that her baby sister is sleeping peacefully. On her way back to her room, she hears Martin return home and tell Aunt Claire that he might see Marianne again because she’s “a charming woman” (142). Furious, Rosalind destroys a batch of brownies that she baked for the eighth-graders’ dance and throws them out the window.
Chapters 6-11 Analysis
In the novel’s second section, the impact of Martin’s new foray into dating creates dynamic shifts in his and his daughters’ characterization. For example, the sisters note that their father is becoming a little impatient and distant towards them in Chapter 9: “‘I have spoken’?’ Jane appealed to the others. ‘Since when does Daddy say things like that?’ ‘He’s not himself,’ said Skye” (108). Similarly, the angst Rosalind feels about her father’s dates negatively impacts her interactions with Tommy in these chapters as she grapples with her confusing new feelings for him, highlighting Birdsall’s thematic interest in The Struggles of Adolescence. Birdsall makes the differences between Aunt Claire’s visit at the start of the book, when Rosalind played the part of the model hostess, and her second visit in Chapter 11 explicit, saying: “Although Aunt Claire arrived later than usual […] she found no freshly baked dessert, no flowers by her bed, no fresh towels. She didn’t even find Rosalind” (133). Seeing Rosalind struggle disrupts the established dynamic between the sisters, motivating Skye to step up and take on Rosalind’s usual responsibilities, demonstrating her growth. In Chapter 9, Skye comforts Rosalind, convinces her to come out of her room, and invites Iantha to join them for dinner because she can tell the woman is lonely. As the story progresses, Skye continues to mature, becoming more attentive to others’ emotional needs despite her strong distaste for feelings.
The sisters’ embrace of Rosalind’s Save-Daddy Plan emphasizes the depth of their grief over losing their mother and foregrounds the challenges of Learning to Love Again After Loss. The sisters oppose the idea of a new mother figure because, as Jane puts it, they feel “[t]hreatened by the specter of stepmother-dom” (127). Although the premise of their plan is fundamentally deceptive, the careful formulation of the scheme underscores the importance the family places on ethics. They aim to “rescue [Martin] without compromising his honor” (74), so they devise a way for him to keep his promise to Aunt Claire without falling in love with any of the women he dates. A strong sense of ethics is an important part of the family members’ identities—both collectively and individually. The ongoing conflict between the Penderwicks’ secrets and their moral conscience escalates as the story continues, creating narrative tension.
In these chapters, Jane’s play, Sisters and Sacrifice, emerges as a motif of The Importance of Honesty and Loyalty. The script tells the story of the valiant and steadfast Rainbow, who is willing to give her life to save her sister, echoing Skye’s willingness to rush to Jane’s defense during the soccer match in the opening chapters. As a motif, the play speaks to both loyalty and honesty—it’s created under disingenuous circumstances because Skye and Jane write each other’s assignments, and it's inspired by the loyalty the Penderwicks feel to each other. In keeping with the moral lesson Birdsall’s book conveys, the sisters’ deception has snowballing consequences, as demonstrated by the teacher’s decision to have the sixth-grade class perform the play.
Birdsall uses foreshadowing to offer clues about the novel’s resolution, disguising them as childish musings from the youngest Penderwick. Batty predicts the story’s happy ending when she tells her sisters, “I say Daddy should date the lady next door” (76). Similarly, her concerns about the Bug Man foreshadow his attempt to steal Iantha’s laptop. The author also offers hints that Marianne is a character in Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility rather than a real woman Martin is dating. For example, he claims that he met Marianne in a bookstore, and “Skye was almost sure he blushed” when she points out the “book peeking out of the jacket’s pocket” while he’s getting ready for his alleged first date with her (134). In the next section, Birdsall provides more information about Martin’s personal connection to Sense and Sensibility, developing Austen’s classic into a motif of learning to love again after loss.
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