Book Review: Best Friends

Mary Bard’s 1955 book Best Friends is the kind of children’s book (currently not much in vogue) in which all the main character’s wildest dreams come true. Suzie already has it pretty good: she and her widowed mother live with Suzie’s doting grandparents in a gorgeous house where Suzie’s grandfather has built her a treehouse called the Lookout. Nonetheless, Suzie wants someone to move into the house next door, she wants a best friend, and she wants her mother to get married so she will no longer have to work at Suzie’s school.

(The modern reader may wish this final dream was more progressive. Let it be recorded that Suzie’s teacher, Miss Morrison, who is going to marry the principal over the summer (Suzie is aghast at this romance: they’re so old! Why, Mr. Wagner the principal is thirty!), intends to keep right on teaching after her marriage: she is going to be back next year as the junior high French teacher.)

At the beginning of the book, Susie espies from her treehouse a family moving into the house next door. Soon she discovers that her new neighbor Co Co is just exactly Suzie’s age, and moreover FRENCH (!!!), and also Co Co’s widowed father was Suzie’s widowed mother’s childhood beau (!!!!!) before he went off to France and married a French girl, who tragically died a few years later. (Suzie’s mother, in a brief nod to realism, lost her first husband in France during World War II.)

Co Co and Suzie swiftly become SUCH good friends that during the remodel of Co Co’s new house (which has stood vacant for nearly a decade and needs some cheering up), Co Co designates one of the bedrooms as Suzie’s, and it is exactly like Co Co’s except that Co Co’s is blue and Suzie’s is pink. And also Co Co has a swimming pool! AND ALSO Suzie’s grandpa makes Co Co a Lookout, exactly like Suzie’s, with a Tarzan rope so the girls can swing from Lookout to Lookout!

There is a slight nod toward realism in the classroom drama: Co Co and Suzie must bear the cross of Millicent and her Select Seven, a clique of girls who talk about their classmates in code and whisper about Suzie in that you-are-meant-to-hear this way. However, once Suzie has Co Co by her side, they vanquish Millicent: Co Co rallies the girls left out of the Select Seven with a code of her own (French!), and then invites the whole class to her house for a swim.

(Suzie and Co Co have a Japanese-American classmate, Sumiko, who gets slightly more characterization than most of the other classmates, although admittedly this means Sumiko has a name and one character trait [she swims well!] whereas most of the other classmates are just names.)

The writing about romance is very fifties: part of Millicent’s villainy lies in her boy-craziness, and Suzie frets continually that Co Co might succumb to boy craziness herself (and of course in the course in the book, sixth-grade Suzie and Co Co end up on their first double date - with a pair of twins!). When Suzie and Co Co begin to despair of their parents ever getting with the program and getting married, they decide to act boy crazy themselves: CLEARLY their parents will go mad with worry and that will force them together, as whenever Suzie misbehaves her folks sigh “That girl needs a father” and whenever Co Co misbehaves, her father says “If only she had a mother’s steadying hand”!

I’m on the fence about whether to get the next two books in the series. I’d have to interlibrary loan them, and although the friendship adventures are cute (I didn’t even mention their amazing joint birthday party, because did I mention Co Co and Suzie were born a mere two days apart? PRACTICALLY TWINS), I did find the writing style rather choppy, and outside of Suzie and Co Co the characters are pretty thinly sketched. (I could not, for instance, tell their twin boyfriends apart.) But OTOH the third book in the trilogy sees them at a boarding school…