Oakleigh

In a small Massachusetts town, five motherless children are rudderless until their father announces he'll remarry. Fourteen-year-old twins Jack and Cynthia scheme with chickens while sixteen-year-old Edith keeps the household from falling apart. When Aunt Betsey funds Jack's poultry-incubator venture, she sparks a prank that tumbles into revelation: the children discover their father is engaged to the kind but unfamiliar Hester Gordon. The family's adjustment unfolds through small dramas, the incubator disaster, a village tennis tournament, the arrival of Hester's outspoken brother Neal. Edith resists the new stepmother while Cynthia embraces her; the younger children cause their usual chaos. Deland captures something rare in children's fiction: the way loss reshapes a family without erasing its humor, and how new beginnings arrive not as resolution but as quiet, complicated hope. For readers who loved Little Women or Anne of Green Gables.