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Book Review: Betsy Was a Junior
Aug. 10th, 2023 07:39 amAs I’ve said before, I love all the Betsy-Tacy books equally. But if you held a gun to my head and demanded that I choose a least favorite, it would be Betsy Was a Junior.
Now even my least favorite Betsy-Tacy book is heaps better than most other books, but nonetheless, I do think this book is slightly marred by didacticism. As George Orwell says, “All books are propaganda,” but in most of the Betsy-Tacy books, these messages are so artfully stirred into the story that you don’t have any sense that there’s a spoonful of medicine going down when, for instance, Betsy and Tacy Befriend the Syrians, or what have you.
In Betsy Was a Junior, however, Lovelace wants to be sure that the reader gets the point about not limiting one’s friendships through cliquishness. After Betsy’s older sister Julia goes away to university, Betsy is so enchanted with her descriptions of sororities that she founds one for her eight best high school friends. The girls have lots of fun, and even convince the boys to found a brother fraternity, but over the course of the year the school grows restive about the sorority’s exclusiveness, and Betsy realizes that it’s impeding her own desire to make new friends outside of the sorority. How can Betsy ever invite Hazel Smith to a party, when all Betsy’s parties for the foreseeable future are sorority dos? At last Betsy concludes:
The sorority plotline is perhaps hammered just a bit too hard, but all the same, this particular passage captures the spirit that animates the series. It’s all about Betsy’s world opening out and out and out, as she meets new people and makes new friends and transcends barriers that earlier hemmed her in, while also deepening her older relationships with her best friends and her family.
This book offers a particularly excellent picture of Betsy’s little sister Margaret, a reserved girl who is polite when forced to play with other children, but really prefers her adult friends. She’s delighted when Betsy offers to put together a Dom. Sci. (Domestic Science) supper for her dog’s and cat’s birthday, only for Betsy to get home quite late that day, a sequence that is a real tour de force of characterization work: Betsy didn’t forget her promise to her sister, but that almost makes it worse that she keeps letting her friends slow her down! And yet her desire to have fun with the Crowd, her repentance afterward, are so real that you can’t be really mad at her, but only hope she’ll do better in the future.
And I love the chapter near the end where Betsy and Tacy and Tib, who have put off making their herbariums for botany all year, rush to get them done all in one night. So relatable. And good sensible Tib realizing that they’ve turned what could have been a pleasure into a nightmare: “Why, I realized last night that I would have enjoyed making a herbarium. I like to do that sort of thing. I could have made a good one.”
Now even my least favorite Betsy-Tacy book is heaps better than most other books, but nonetheless, I do think this book is slightly marred by didacticism. As George Orwell says, “All books are propaganda,” but in most of the Betsy-Tacy books, these messages are so artfully stirred into the story that you don’t have any sense that there’s a spoonful of medicine going down when, for instance, Betsy and Tacy Befriend the Syrians, or what have you.
In Betsy Was a Junior, however, Lovelace wants to be sure that the reader gets the point about not limiting one’s friendships through cliquishness. After Betsy’s older sister Julia goes away to university, Betsy is so enchanted with her descriptions of sororities that she founds one for her eight best high school friends. The girls have lots of fun, and even convince the boys to found a brother fraternity, but over the course of the year the school grows restive about the sorority’s exclusiveness, and Betsy realizes that it’s impeding her own desire to make new friends outside of the sorority. How can Betsy ever invite Hazel Smith to a party, when all Betsy’s parties for the foreseeable future are sorority dos? At last Betsy concludes:
You couldn't make sisterhoods with rules and elections. If they meant anything, they had to grow naturally... You ought not to go through life, even a small section of life like high school or college, with your friendships fenced in by snobbish artificial barriers.
"It would be like living in a pasture when you could have the whole world to roam in," Betsy thought. "I don't believe sororities would appeal very long to anyone with much sense of adventure."
The sorority plotline is perhaps hammered just a bit too hard, but all the same, this particular passage captures the spirit that animates the series. It’s all about Betsy’s world opening out and out and out, as she meets new people and makes new friends and transcends barriers that earlier hemmed her in, while also deepening her older relationships with her best friends and her family.
This book offers a particularly excellent picture of Betsy’s little sister Margaret, a reserved girl who is polite when forced to play with other children, but really prefers her adult friends. She’s delighted when Betsy offers to put together a Dom. Sci. (Domestic Science) supper for her dog’s and cat’s birthday, only for Betsy to get home quite late that day, a sequence that is a real tour de force of characterization work: Betsy didn’t forget her promise to her sister, but that almost makes it worse that she keeps letting her friends slow her down! And yet her desire to have fun with the Crowd, her repentance afterward, are so real that you can’t be really mad at her, but only hope she’ll do better in the future.
And I love the chapter near the end where Betsy and Tacy and Tib, who have put off making their herbariums for botany all year, rush to get them done all in one night. So relatable. And good sensible Tib realizing that they’ve turned what could have been a pleasure into a nightmare: “Why, I realized last night that I would have enjoyed making a herbarium. I like to do that sort of thing. I could have made a good one.”
