The trope of motherless children is well-
known in fairy tales but it persists in modern-day children's books as well. Picking up
The Saturdays, the first in the
Melendy Quartet by Elizabeth Enright, a classic I missed reading as a child, I groaned when I discovered that the Melendy children's mother was dead, a fact introduced within the first few pages. But, I must admit, I also felt a delicious anticipation. After all, books about Motherless Children Having Adventures are usually good, if they meet the following criteria:
They feature several siblings (usually more than 2) who are, of course, motherless but have a mother figure, often the oldest sibling and/or a housekeeper with a cute nickname, their father is well-meaning but bumbling and inept when it comes to childcare, rendering them quite independent, they live in an old rambling house (which often has a cute name as well), often with a garden and, of course, they have all sorts of adventures.
I always think of these books as being British, although they often are not -
The Saturdays and another example of the genre, The
The Penderwicks series by Jeanne Birdsall, were both written by Americans and set here. But both have characters with British sounding names such as Cuffy (the housekeeper in
The Saturdays) and Churchie (the housekeeper in
The Penderwicks, not to mention youngest sister Batty and the name Penderwick itself).
The Shoes books by Noel Streatfeild, which actually are British, come close to falling in this category too. And in
the Cobble Street cousins series by Cynthia Rylant, the main characters are cousins instead of siblings and their parents are merely conveniently absent rather than dead. Of course, there are the only-child orphans, like in
The Secret Garden and
Anne of Green Gables, which to my mind are in a different class of book entirely.
Wracking my brain, I was only able to come up with one classic character of children's literature who has two parents who figure prominently in the book:
Ramona.
Betsy, Tacy, and Tib all have both parents as does Betsy in the
B is for Betsy series but the parents don't play a major role. They are perhaps slightly more prominent in the
Riverside Kids series. In Laurel Snyder's
Penny Dreadful, the protagonist's father's unemployment is the catalyst for all that follows, but unlike when
Ramona's father loses his job in
Ramona and Her Father, her parents' trials and tribulations seem more a way to provide
Penny with the independence to have all sorts of adventures, rather than an issue in and of themselves. I'm sure middle grade and YA literature feature parents more prominently as the main character's relationship with his or her parents can be an important theme at that age (I can think of Rebecca Stead's
When You Reach Me as well as most if not all of the books by
Judy Blume and that's just off the top of my head), but authors of books for younger children seem to enjoy killing the mothers off.
It's easy to see why. In
The Saturdays the children pool their allowance and each takes a turn at having a special adventure in New York. Alone. No mother would allow that! But it certainly is a handy plot device. For another take on
The Saturdays, head over to
Storied Cities.
I remember reading lots of books about Motherless Children Having Adventures as a kid but I'm having trouble retrieving all their names now. Any ideas? And what about books for younger readers from the other end of the spectrum, which feature one or both parents of the main character prominently?
