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Book Review: Betsy-Tacy
Jul. 3rd, 2023 08:42 amIt’s been thirty years since I was five, and I don’t remember it nearly as well as Maud Hart Lovelace, and yet rereading her book Betsy-Tacy feels like it unlocks the memories. Not specific memories, mind you, as Lovelace was five a hundred years before I was; but the feeling of being five, of being very small in a world that is very big, and yet is just beginning to open up.
Like many other American classic children’s books (Little House, All-of-a-Kind Family), the Betsy-Tacy series is a semi-autobiographical account of the author’s childhood. Betsy-Tacy is the first in the series, and begins just before Betsy turns five, the first time she meets Tacy.
That first meeting goes poorly - bashful Tacy runs away - but they meet again at Betsy’s birthday party, and after that they become inseparable. Most nights at dinner they take their plates and scamper up to the bench at the top of the street, where they sit together and eat as Betsy makes up stories. My favorite is the one where Betsy imagines that the pink sunset clouds are feathers, and one of the pink feathers drifts down, and the girls climb on and drift upward so they can see across the town.
It’s a delightful, episodic book, full of the goofy fun things that kids do: deciding to build themselves a house halfway up the Big Hill and trying to catch a chicken to provide eggs, making a piano box into their clubhouse (this sounds so delightfully cozy), playing paper dolls before the stove and watching the warm flames flicker through the isinglass. They dress up as grown-ups and go calling at a neighbor’s house, then down to their favorite chocolate-colored house with a turret. No one answers the door, so they leave Betsy’s mother’s calling card in the mailbox.
And there are more serious moments, too. Tacy’s baby sister dies, and Betsy comforts her by telling her a story of her sister up in Heaven, and they leave their best purple Easter egg in a bird’s nest high in a tree for a robin to take up to Heaven for little Bee. It’s so different from the way current children’s books deal with death: Tacy is sad with a young child’s grief, inchoate and anxious and confused. After one chapter, we move on. Just one episode in the larger story.
At the end of the book, a neighbor calls: her family just moved into the chocolate-colored house, and she was so pleased to find a calling card from Betsy’s mother! Fortunately all turns out well: the new neighbors have a little girl just Betsy and Tacy’s age, a fluffy-haired imp called Tib, who will join in all of Betsy and Tacy’s subsequent adventures.
Like many other American classic children’s books (Little House, All-of-a-Kind Family), the Betsy-Tacy series is a semi-autobiographical account of the author’s childhood. Betsy-Tacy is the first in the series, and begins just before Betsy turns five, the first time she meets Tacy.
That first meeting goes poorly - bashful Tacy runs away - but they meet again at Betsy’s birthday party, and after that they become inseparable. Most nights at dinner they take their plates and scamper up to the bench at the top of the street, where they sit together and eat as Betsy makes up stories. My favorite is the one where Betsy imagines that the pink sunset clouds are feathers, and one of the pink feathers drifts down, and the girls climb on and drift upward so they can see across the town.
It’s a delightful, episodic book, full of the goofy fun things that kids do: deciding to build themselves a house halfway up the Big Hill and trying to catch a chicken to provide eggs, making a piano box into their clubhouse (this sounds so delightfully cozy), playing paper dolls before the stove and watching the warm flames flicker through the isinglass. They dress up as grown-ups and go calling at a neighbor’s house, then down to their favorite chocolate-colored house with a turret. No one answers the door, so they leave Betsy’s mother’s calling card in the mailbox.
And there are more serious moments, too. Tacy’s baby sister dies, and Betsy comforts her by telling her a story of her sister up in Heaven, and they leave their best purple Easter egg in a bird’s nest high in a tree for a robin to take up to Heaven for little Bee. It’s so different from the way current children’s books deal with death: Tacy is sad with a young child’s grief, inchoate and anxious and confused. After one chapter, we move on. Just one episode in the larger story.
At the end of the book, a neighbor calls: her family just moved into the chocolate-colored house, and she was so pleased to find a calling card from Betsy’s mother! Fortunately all turns out well: the new neighbors have a little girl just Betsy and Tacy’s age, a fluffy-haired imp called Tib, who will join in all of Betsy and Tacy’s subsequent adventures.
