I know all of these show four stars, but the first two are 3.5, and each one is better than the one preceding it. There are six more Besty Tacy books, but I don't believe I need to read any more of them. The rest of them are high school books. I'm led to believe the tone changes, they're no longer considered children's books, and I suspect there's a focus on boys and romance in the latest ones. That's all fine and good, but I've found that when a coming of age story about little girls gets to the part where she gets twitterpated with boys, the story is less interesting. I think this happened with Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm and Anne-with-an-e from the Anne of Green Gables series, but it's been a while since I read those.

Anyway, I enjoyed the four I read and recommend it to anyone who likes children's books about girls who are just having some good, wholesome fun. Links below go to my reviews.

Betsy-Tacy: ★★★★✰ (3.5)
Betsy-Tacy and Tib: ★★★★✰ (3.5)
Betsy and Tacy Go over the Big Hill: ★★★★✰
Betsy and Tacy Go Downtown: ★★★★✰

Cleanliness:

Children's Bad Words
Mild Obscenities and Substitutions - 7 Incidents: pooh, double darn, by golly, stupid
Name Calling - 10 Incidents: stuck up, dago, red-headed woodpecker, copycats, Negro, idiots
Religious Profanity - 28 Incidents: Pete's sake, goodness sake, mercy goodness, gol darn, gee whiz, gee whitakers, gosh, gee, golly, gosh darn, Lord-a-mercy

Religious & Supernatural - 6 Incidents: Betsy and Tacy make-believe that a horse is "magical" because it can talk to them. The girls try to "hypnotize" a girl into taking them to a play. They realize it doesn't work. A girl is going to die and she says spirits come to her in her sleep. (The main characters are watching the play of Uncle Tom's Cabin where this is said). A little girl writes a story where a little girl looses her head and wanders around until she finds someone who loves her just the way she is. The man who finds her ends up being a kind of god, and when he prays to the gods and goddesses, the little girl's head gets attached again and they live happily ever after. The children look forward to Santa Claus coming that night. The characters watch a play of Rip Van Winkle where it says that spirits played nice pins in the mountains.

Violence - None

Romance Related - 4 Incidents: Three girls "fall in love" with the young king of Spain but they then decide that Tib should be the one to marry him "because of her ringlets." They pin pictures of him to their underwaists. (Comes across childish and cute). A girl walks home with a boy beside her. He carries her books and the little girls tease/comment about this. One girl does say that she thinks a boy at school wears cute clothes. The boy and girl don't wish to be pestered by the children so send them off with some money to get a treat. Four girls all like one boy because "he had attractions other than his knicker-bockers. He was handsome ... with thick blond hair, a rosy skin, and lively blue eyes." "Breast" and "bosom" are used - not sexually.

Attitudes/Disobedience - 5 Incidents: Saucy boys teased her: "Where's the cheese, apple pie?" "Where's your mush, milk?"' Three little girls decide to start a "being good" club but it goes awry when it becomes more fun to put a pebble in a bag when they do something bad. It ends with the girls getting in trouble, their mother's speaking to them and the girls deciding to change the club a little so they really will be good. A boy yells "dago" at "all the Syrians and it's not a nice thing to do." Boys tease a little Syrian girl but feel sorry afterwards. Three girls and their older sisters get into a quarrel. "Not an ordinary quarrel... This quarrel was different. It lasted for days. Their fathers and mothers knew about it; the whole neighborhood knew about it. And while it was exciting at first, it made Julia and Katie and Betsy and Tacy and Tib all feel bad before it was ended."

Conversation Topics - 12 Incidents: Mentions a pipe (and several times throughout the book the father smokes it). A jug of cider is mentioned. Mentions going to a Mason's meeting to recite a poem. "It was a curious looking pipe. It stood on the floor, more than a foot high; a long tube led away from it, ending in the old man's mouth." "That is a narghile ... He draws the smoke through water and it makes the sound you hear. You Americans all it a hubble-bubble pipe." (There is an illustration of this). He'll "likely be smoking a hubble-bubble pipe." The girls hide from their parents that they are reading "cheap, dime" novels. It concludes with a mother/daughter conversation. Mentions a song titled Brown October Ale. (twice) Mentions a "Schlitz beer calendar." (twice) A man had run away when he was seventeen because he had quarreled with his stepfather, "a grim man who had not approved of the boy's lightheartedness." When a girl shows her mother the cheap, dime books she'd been hiding, the mother says: "Betsy, it's a mistake for you to read that stuff. There's no great harm in it, but if you're going to be a writer you need to read good books. The mother then comes up with a plan. Someone has a collection of pipes. The family (including the oldest daughter with her beau) dance to waltzes and the Virginia Reel.

Parent Takeaway
The main characters typically think liking boys is a silly thing, so any boy/girl mentions are not fantasized or lengthy. As is customary with many children's classics and books written before the 1950s, if there is any bad behavior exhibited by the children in the story, the narration always clarifies this by saying something like, "the children knew they had been naughty and felt very sorry afterwards."

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Charming as they were when I was a child! So much fun to revisit these lovely novels as an adult.

Betsy-Tacy: 3 stars
Betsy-Tacy and Tib: 3 stars
Betsy and Tacy Go Over the Big Hill: 4 stars
Betsy and Tacy Go Downtown: 4.5, maybe even 5 stars, I loved this one. Would've loved it even more as a child, I'm sure.

I also loved all the notes at the end about the author, illustrator, and each book. Would definitely recommend these bind-up editions.

This book took me over 5 months to read, but I really loved it. This first half is pretty slow, but the rest of it was great. I think it was amazing how Maud Hart Lovelace captured the precise thoughts of a child and the marvels of the early 1900s. If you liked this book, I highly recommend "Anne of Green Gables" (0bviously a must-read) by Lucy Maud Montgomery and the "Ramie Nightingale" books by Kate Dicamillo.

n  ********* Learning to Fly *********n  
n  n  
n  ******************************n

It's so very hard to ever pick one single favorite book from one's childhood, but I have such an easy time picking out tons of 'favorites.' The Betsy-Tacy books would definitely be up there on the favorites list.

If there was ever a book character in child form who came close to who I was a child, it would have been Betsy, the star of these books. She was all over the place, and I loved her for it. Her crazy schemes and ideas often mirrored some of the games that I forced my own friends to play. She loved to write and explore, and gently 'boss' her friends into doing things. I can relate.

And while I do have lots of memories of fun adventures and the like, I don't think I got to live quite as epically as Betsy did, so my former child self loved to indulge in these books and take my own imagination to another level of what childhood could be like.

I'm glad that adulthood didn't dampen the enjoyment of these stories. Maybe it helps to be able to remember how I felt the first time that I read the books. Because, for whatever reason, I never get that same giddy excitement when I try to read a newer/more modern children's book. The closest I came might have been with the Percy Jackson series, and that's more likely because the author included humor that would also appeal to adults, so that's kind of cheating.

The illustrations absolutely MADE the reading experience. Every single picture helped recreate Betsy, Tacy and Tib's world in my mind. I never would have imagined anything half as grand as what the illustrator gave the readers. Given that I was reading a historical book, I wouldn't have known how the clothing looked, or the rooms, etc. so it was an extra treat to have someone explain everything to me through pictures. And the girls were so darn cute.

The magic of the Betsy-Tacy world was a large part of my favorite childhood reading experiences. I was happy to get to revisit this world and still find that the magic had never left.


End note for offensive content warning : (Very) Brief mention of blackface. Little Tib reflects that she could perform a character in a play if she blacks her face. If I were to read this story to a child now, or let a child read the story, I would use the mention as a teaching experience to illustrate why this behavior is wrong and hurtful, and I would explain the history behind it. If this same mention was entertained as acceptable in a modern day book, I would refuse to finish it. Any modern author should know better.

There's also a touch of outdated gender roles in the mix as well. When Tib expresses interest in growing up to be an architect, her father tells her that this is something her brother would do, and that she would become a housewife. Again, I'd use this as another teaching moment to show how times and people have changed. Perception was not always the same as it is now. And history can be used to learn how to do better than the people who came before us.

S.’s second time through! M. And I shared the reading, so I think by now I’ve read all, or at least almost-all, of the chapters. She’s not ready for the high school part of the series yet, but I want to read them!

The betsy Tacy books for the most part, took place in Mankato, Minnesota where my mother grew up. She herself read the books and then passed them to my sister and I.I passed them on to my girls who passed them on to their girls. Wonderful, endearing books with adorable illustrations.

I really enjoyed this. It was only through friends that I ever heard about the Betsy-Tacy books, and finally got around to reading them. Now I know why they're so loved. These first four books in the series are so heartwarming, sweet and with a lovely sense of humour.

I am happily revisiting a series that was a childhood favorite.

I'll be honest. It took me a good while to warm up to Betsy and her world. I kept comparing her to Anne Shirley and the world of Avonlea and finding her lacking somehow. I was wondering, is something wrong with me? Actresses like Bette Midler sing Betsy's praises. Writers like Meg Cabot and Ann M. Martin worship her. Why didn't I like her? I felt very out of sorts. But by book 3 in this treasury, I started to have a new appreciation for her and by book 4 when we met the wonderful and sweet Mrs. Poppy, I started to care about her and see the appeal of the books. Now I even plan to read the next stories in the series.

I can't believe I didn't even know about these books as a child. I was busy reading the Beverly Cleary, Laura Ingalls Wilder, E.B. White and Catherine Wooley books, among many others. Fortunately a good friend of mine loved them and encouraged me to read them. They bring back memories of innocence and creativity from my early years, and invoke a strong sense of neighborhood, family and loyal friendship.