This Newbery Award Honor book takes a period in America’s recent history and draws the story around it. Since I’ve read several of these such books recently – like Hattie Big Sky and Higher Power of Lucky, I was initially skeptical. In the case of Penny from Heaven, the book is set in the 1950’s. Yet as I read it, I realized kids will no doubt be interested and amused by some of the habits and idiosyncrasies from this time period, if nothing else ~ hings like hand-wrung washing machines, milk men and a fear of polio crop up throughout the book, setting the stage for a decade that wasn’t that long ago yet to today’s kids will doubt seem like a time in the DISTANT past! Beyond that, the themes of the story transcend decades!
The book tells the story of Penny, an 11-year-old living with her widowed mother and grandparents. The relationship between her deceased father’s family and her mom is tenuous, yet the families have an agreement that Penny can spend as much time with either family as she wishes. She cherishes her father’s big, Italian family, the abundant food, the friendship with her cousin, her job at her uncle’s store and even the chores she helps her Nonna with.
Things on her mother’s side aren’t as good. Although Penny’s dad died when she was just a baby, she’s upset when her mother starts dating again, she feels the rules placed on her by her grandparents are hardly fair, and on top of it all, she’s curious about the circumstances surrounding her father’s death – which everyone has always told her was illness-related. These things come to a head when Penny suffers an accident that could leave her without the use of her arm. The families must come to terms with each other and Penny finds out the real cause of her father’s death.
At first I was a little skeptical about reading another Newbery Award book set decades back and felt like kids nowadays could use more relevant story-telling. But as I got into the book it because clear that these issues, fears, themes and excitements span decades and time and are real to all kids, no matter what period in history they live in. I loved Penny’s character – a precocious, stubborn and blunt 11-year-old and the author does a great job of making that personality shine through in the dialogue and writing style. This is a heroine any kid will be able to identify with! Highly recommend this Newbery Award Honoree!
