Discussion Main / MassiveNumberedSiblings

And here are some guesses about books I haven’t (recently) read:

• In The Secret Garden, Martha and Dickon are two of twelve siblings.
• The title character of Jacob Two-Two is the youngest of five children. His sister Emma is named for Emma Richler, whose book Sister Crazy is also about a family with five children.
• In Mitch and Amy, Bernadette seems to have five brothers.
• At the start of the Emancipated series by M. G. Reyes, the stepsisters Candace and Grace live with Grace’s three younger brothers.
• The Baker’s Dozen series is about the Baker family, which has twelve children, including quintuplets.

I haven’t seen Miss Spider's Sunny Patch Friends, either, but its page says "It features the adventures of a spider Mom and Dad and their family of eight children— five spiders and three adopted 'buglets'". Tokyo Mew Mew also says that Bu-ling Huang / Mew Pudding has five younger siblings, but doesn’t mention this trope. Monster High says that Clawdeen Wolf has Massive Numbered Siblings. I don’t know much about the franchise, but I think the novel Where’s a Wolf, There’s a Way doesn’t mention Clawdia, but mentions four brothers: Howldon or Don, Howie (they and Howleen are triplets), Clawdeen’s youngest brother Howlnor, nicknamed Nino, and younger brother Howlmilton, nicknamed Rocks. From the summaries of Colleen O'Shaughnessy Mc Kenna’s novels Mother Murphy and Camp Murphy, it seems that a fifth Murphy child is about to be born, but I don’t know how the birth goes. The first book of the series about the Murphy family is already titled Too Many Murphys. In the Fifth-Grade Stars book series, the twins Beth and Sara Greenfield have two younger siblings and another one on the way—but again, I’m not sure if their birth is part of the story. Should we add Ally’s World? As far as I know without reading most of the books, the fifth Love-child’s arrival home is a surprise, and perhaps the first Love-child leaves home soon after?

In general, how important is the "under the same roof" part? Maybe Jacqueline Wilson's novel The Suitcase Kid doesn’t count, because the title character's "five and a half new siblings" are three stepsiblings in her mother's house and twin stepsiblings and a new half-sibling in her father's house. But what about books where some siblings have simply moved out?

• Tortall Universe already says that Keladry (the main character of Protector of the Small) has Massive Numbered Siblings, but I don't know how many of them have lived under the same roof at the same time.
• Red Queen also lists the Massive Numbered Siblings trope, but in the beginning (which is all I've read), Mare’s older siblings are all away in the military.
• I think that in The Selection, the main character is one of five children, but only three of them still live at home at the start of the series.
• Wikipedia says that Mina Smiths in The Tillerman Family Series is the fifth of six children, but I'm not sure if the two oldest still live at home by the beginning of Come a Stranger.
• Wikipedia also says that in the Girl Talk series, Sabrina "Sabs" Wells "is the youngest of five, and the only girl. She lives with her parents and her brothers Luke (who is in high school), Mark (who is in eighth grade), and Sam (her twin, who is four minutes older than she is and teases her about it). Her oldest brother, Matthew, is away at college." (The article says that the series is by K. A. Applegate, but here she said she wrote 9 books of it.)
• And what about William Wordsworth’s poem "We Are Seven"?

I'm not sure how relevant this is, but The Baby-Sitters Club series has not only the three large families mentioned on the page, but also massive numbered families with some siblings: most families have (or wanted) at least two children, many have three, and a few have four. I think someone's said this might be a way to write about many children while keeping track of relatively few families. Only children are not just rare, but I think someone's said that they are also often portrayed as having some problem like loneliness.