Book Review: Fat Caterpillars

Title: Fat Caterpillars 

Author: Jill Penrod

Date: 2017

ISBN: 978-1386287445

Quote: "Life...rolling along so peacefully that we can forget about the inevitability of change."

This is the first volume in a series of young adult novels--not mere romances, although most of them include a romance, but novels where the characters think about other things as well. Most of the characters are Christians, throughout the series. And it's my painful duty to warn you that there are no cute or gross caterpillars in this book. There's just a pious thought about how peaceful times in our lives are like the periods in a caterpillar's life when it's merely growing inside its current skin, inevitably punctuated by the times when the caterpillar has to molt into a new skin. If that kind of thought disgusts you more than a caterpillar does, you're not alone, but I find myself forgiving Penrod for it because the characters are sympathetic.

Terry Kenton has nice, caring parents, but they're busy with the triplets. When one set of triplet toddlers start to grow up, Terry's mother gives birth to another set. Then Terry learns that he was one of triplets, too. Seeing evidence that Terry was going to be born with a deformed leg, and thinking that twins would be enough to rear, his mother agreed to an operation to abort Terry. It went wrong; the twins died and only Terry survived. With his awkward, crooked leg.

But meanwhile Terry has his adoptive grandfather, a neighbor who spends lots of time showing Terry how to raise vegetables in the garden. The garden also attracts Molly, whose parents get divorced and who is molested by a potential stepfather. Terry and Molly have a wonderful sex-free friendship until their mid-teens, when Terry starts to wish it weren't sex-free. But it is, until...that'd be telling.

Terry always wants to grow up like his adoptive grandfather, and that's the role he will play, in relation to the young people who hang out at his house when he's grown up, in the following volumes in this series.