The Best-Ever Audiobooks for Your Next Family Road Trip

The Penderwicks series

If you’ve been wondering why they don’t write children’s books like they used to, you’ll be enchanted by Jeanne Birdsall’s award-winning novels about a quirky family of motherless girls, their Latin-spouting botanist father, and irrepressible dog, Hound. Hailed as an instant classic when it came out in 2005, the first one takes the Penderwicks to a guesthouse summer rental on Arundel, a fancy estate where a very nice boy lives with his snobby mother. The estate (and the Penderwicks) will never be the same again. The whole series is wonderful and Susan Denaker reads them with just the right balance between expression and understatement.