Book Review: Betsy-Tacy

[osprey_archer]

It’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.

Comments

[littlerhymes]

So delightful! I am so glad you introduced me to these books.

[osprey_archer]

They're such fun books! I've always been sorry I didn't review them properly last time I read them, so this time I'm going to make up for the lack.

[oracne]

I never read these, and now I wish I had.

[asakiyume]

How truly fun! I never read these books, but I know what you mean about stories that have this episodic approach, and where the adventure are small and intimate.

Nowadays there's a sense that you have to make a book slightly older than your audience, but I wonder if that was true then. Are Betsy and Tacy five years old? If so, were the stories to be read to five-year-olds, do you think? Or slightly older kids? They age up as the series goes on, yes? How old are they by the end of the series?

[ellenmillion]

I worried that these books wouldn't weather time well - I remembered loving them as a kid but hesitated to give them to my daughter. I was so delighted that I still enjoyed them when she was old enough to read them - and she did, too! <3

[troisoiseaux]

Ooh, are you going to be re-reading the series?

[osprey_archer]

It's never too late! Well, for some books it is sometimes too late, but I don't think it's ever too late for Betsy-Tacy.

[osprey_archer]

Yes! One of my first and firmest road trip plans is a visit to Mankato, Maud Hart Lovelace's hometown and the model for Deep Valley, so of course I HAVE to reread Betsy-Tacy in preparation. And I may buy some of her out-of-print historical novels once I'm at the museum.

[osprey_archer]

That's always such a worry with childhood favorites. But I'm glad that you enjoyed them on reread and that your daughter enjoyed them, too!

[osprey_archer]

My very vague understanding is that Betsy-Tacy was an early reader book, the idea being that perhaps five and six year olds would read Betsy-Tacy on their own, although I expect often it was a read-aloud. For the first four books, the reading level and the girls grow together. Then the reading level reaches what you might call "full reading fluency" and remains there through the last book, Betsy's Wedding, which starts with Betsy's wedding and continues through the first few years of Betsy's married life.

[rachelmanija]

Betsy-Tacy is so delightful. I was also struck by how differently death was dealt with. It felt realistic in a way that wouldn't be written nowadays.

[genarti]

This is fascinating! I never actually read the Betsy-Tacy books at all, and so I'd developed a sort of hazy impression of them that's very different than this sounds; I thought they were about young adult women coming of age and seeing fellows and generally making their way in the world. Do they grow up over the course of the series, or did I just get them completely muddled with some other books?

Either way, I love your description of how Tacy's sister's death is dealt with. It sounds completely different than how anyone would do it these days, and very realistic.

[osprey_archer]

Yes, I think one of the great strengths of the Betsy-Tacy books is that they are so matter-of-factly realistic about things like death, or children's questions about God, or later on romance, in a way that slices right through a lot of cliches.

[osprey_archer]

Oh, yes, that definitely happens in the later books! The first book starts when Betsy is four, and the last one ends sometime in her twenties after her marriage, and in between we get the girls growing up and seeing fellows and starting careers.

Lovelace's books are always realistic and matter-of-fact about things like death or religion, topics that other children's books struggle with or won't touch. Maybe in part it's because there's such a strong autobiographical component? There's a solid base of realism behind all the golden glowing nostalgia, and I think it's the mixture of those two elements that makes the books so irresistible.

[nnozomi]

Oh, the Betsy-Tacy books! I loved them. They do such a good job of making the whole setting come to life. I haven't read the little-girl ones in a long time, but I remember the fascination of the chocolate-colored house... . And I'm pretty sure that, as you quote, I learned the word "bashful" on Tacy's account. (I'll look forward especially to your reviews of the high-school books, if you want to go that far, which were always my favorites.)

[osprey_archer]

I'm planning to go all the way through the series! And I'll definitely reread Emily of Deep Valley, too, although I'm on the fence about Carney's House Party and Winona's Pony Cart.