The Betsy-Tacy Treasury is the first four of the Betsy-Tacy books: Betsy-Tacy, Betsy-Tacy and Tib, Betsy and Tacy Go Over the Big Hill, and Betsy and Tacy Go Downtown. Included in the book are great forwards by current authors that are also fans including Judy Blume, Ann M. Martin, and Johanna Hurwitz. There are also sections at the end with background about Maud Hart Lovelace, illustrator Lois Lenski, and each of the four books included. I loved all of this information and found it very interesting. Also interesting was the praise at the beginning of the book for Maud Hart Lovelace from such personalities as Anna Quindlen, Meg Cabot, Laura Lippman, Bette Midler, Nora Ephron, Lorna Landvick, etc. In particular, Anna Quindlen stated, “There are three authors whose body of work I have reread more than once in my adult life: Charles Dickens, Jane Austen, and Maud Hart Lovelace.” This is praise indeed!

Was this book truly worthy of all of this praise? I am more than happy to say a very emphatic “YES!” By the end of the first book, I had fallen in love with Betsy Ray and Tacy Kelly and their world in Deep Valley, Minnesota. Deep Valley is the Mankato of Lovelace’s childhood around the turn of the nineteenth century. (For fellow Little House on the Prairie TV series fans, this is the same Mankato that characters from Walnut Grove visit to get trade goods.)

Five-year old Betsy is excited when a new family with lots of children moves into the house across the street. One girl appears to be her age. After a slight misunderstanding, they soon become fast friends and the people of Hill Street and Deep Valley can’t remember a time when Betsy-Tacy were not friends. Soon a new girl moves in to the chocolate house on the way to school, and Tib becomes their fast friend. Betsy wants to be a writer and is full of imaginative stories. Tacy is shy, but loyal and fun. Tib is very matter of fact and also very pretty. The books move through their lives. By book two they are eight, book three they are ten, and book four they are twelve.

What did I like so much about this book? Although the adventures took place long before my childhood, the spirit of their life and adventures perfectly captures the spirit and joy of childhood that does not change through the ages. The wonder of the world and how one street and one city can seem so giant and faraway places like Milwaukee can be viewed with imaginative delight are just how a child views the world. Their adventures playing and making up stories reminded me of the fun I had as a child with my best friend Stephanie and sister Kristi doing very similar things. It was wonderful how Lovelace was able to capture her childhood and to remember what it was like to be a child and to have a fantastic imagination that can make climbing a hill the most exciting journey.

What really brought these books to the next level to me was when in book one, tragedy strikes. Tacy’s baby sister, Bee, dies from a childhood illness. Tacy and Betsy go for a walk and Tacy is very sad about her sister’s death. Betsy tries to cheer her up and talks to her about Bee’s adventures in heaven. “Of course she can see us. She’s looking down right now. And I’ll tell you what tickles Bee. She knows all about Heaven, and we don’t. She’s younger than we are, but she knows something that we don’t. Isn’t that funny? She’s just a baby, and she knows more than we do.”

Betsy brings the death down to the level of a child’s understanding, and is able to make Tacy think of all of the fun that Bee is having in heaven being a big girl and watching out for her family. I found it to be a very moving conversation and quite touching. Betsy and Tacy are the best kind of friends; the kind of friends that can help you out in a moment of crisis and be what you need them to be.

I also really enjoyed how Betsy, Tacy, Tib befriend a little girl (Naifi) from “Little Syria” in Deep Valley in Betsy and Tacy Go Over the Big Hill. They defend her when she is picked on by some rather nasty boys. Tib’s mother (Mrs. Muller) had some wise words to say about it, “I’m glad Tib stood up for that little Syrian girl. Foreign people should not be treated like that. America is made up of foreign people. Both of Tib’s grandmothers came from the other side. Perhaps when they got off the boat they looked a little strange too.”

Overall, The Betsy-Tacy Treasury was a wonderful, delightful series of books that I am very happy to have finally read. They are great adventures of childhood wonder and also have beautiful illustrations. I will definitely be reading these stories to my daughter when she gets older and I’m already planning for making a future trip to Mankato to check out Big Valley. I also want to read the rest of their adventures as they grow into teenagers and beyond! My only complaint is that poor Tib is always left off of the title of the books.

This review was first posted at: http://lauragerold.blogspot.com/2011/...

As a child, I read the first three Betsy-Tacy books over and over, but I didn’t know there was more to the series. I finished it in 2018, but haven’t read all of them back-to-back before. So, here we are!

Growing up, I thought Maud Hart Lovelace had the most romantic name in the world. Two decades later, I haven’t found a more romantic one! And it’s not even a penname.

Omnibus editions are not usually my favorite, but I love the omnibus editions of Lovelace's books. They preserve all the original illustrations, have lovely short introductions by authors who were inspired by Betsy, and appendices that connect the fiction to the real world, complete with photographs.

Betsy-Tacy
I remembered all the fun hijinks our heroines enjoyed, but I’d forgotten the emotional core of this novel. Tacy’s baby sister dies, and Betsy comforts her. Later, when the Rays have a baby, Tacy encourages Betsy in her role as a big sister. Sobbing, y’all. Honestly, I can’t think of another book for such young readers that deals with friendship through loss in this way. It’s tender, exemplary yet realistic, and hopeful. I am very much here for teaching five-year-olds how to be present to friends in grief and provide hope. Though it kind of broke my heart.

Content warning: sibling/infant death

Betsy, Tacy, and Tib
Even more hijinks in this one, and some good, clever parenting. I adore how the Deep Valley neighborhood parents trust one another and none of the adults are bad. See, children’s authors? Your characters can have all the fun adventures without being orphans!

Matilda is an unsung comedic queen. “‘I hear,’ she said meaningly, ‘that Mrs. Ray’s kitchen looked nice too after you kept house for her one day.’”

Betsy and Tacy Go over the Big Hill
I adore the wit of this title, because BTT turn 10 and consider themselves grown up (for about a day) and thus are literally and figuratively “over the hill.” They stand up for a girl being bullied (not immediately, and to personal peril). They learn about how crucial immigration is to the identity of the United States, and to respect and enjoy other cultures.

I would have sworn that Tacy was the Catholic one. Some of my ancestors were German Catholic immigrants like the Muller grandparents, and I enjoy that part of Tib’s story.

Betsy and Tacy Go Downtown
Downtown is the transitional volume between the childhood and girlhood books. Betsy is certainly still a child, but she is given new freedoms (and new expectations) as she grows up. It makes for a neat transition between the hijinks of the earlier books and the social life of the later books, as more characters are introduced and the world of BTT grows less insular.

I wish Lovelace hadn’t left the Naifi thread hanging. She explores the Syrian immigrant world more fully in Emily of Deep Valley, but it was such an important part of Big Hill that it needed to be carried through Downtown, in my opinion. Yet, because of the narrative thread of Betsy’s reading and writing, Downtown is still a strong novel with a solid core.

Overall, there are some cheesy elements, but having grown up in Wisconsin, I am duty-bound to like cheese.

Content warning: period-accurate blackface in theater productions

Here is what my nine year old daughter has to say:

I liked when Betsy and Tacy played paper dolls in magazines and I liked when they met Tib for the first time. I liked how they were best friends. I would like to read it again and again!

I read and loved quite a few of the Betsy-Tacy books when I was a young girl and I have been in the mood to revisit them so I picked up this collection of the first four books from my library. It was so fun to immerse myself in the world of Betsy, Tacy, and Tib again that I have decided to keep on reading the rest of the series this year.

I will say the stories get more fun as the girl's get older and have a little more independence and begin to discover their true personalities but I think it's important to start at the beginning and watch them grow. There is some dated language and references but I think if you can take them in the context of when the books were written, they don't detract from the overall enjoyment of the stories.

Simply charming. I hope all of my girls will read these books.

These books were great fun!
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Younger me would have been obsessed with these rambunctious girls.
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Some of the stories reminded me of shenanigans that I would get into with my cousins at our grandparents' house.

DNF'd at page 183. Loved these books when I was younger, just couldn't get into it this time around. Still very nostalgic for me.

Omnibus: Four stories based on the author's life from the age of 5 to 12; cute, funny, and nostalgic. Kids will probably enjoy them more, but 3-stars from adult me. The first book stands out for its whimsy tinged with sadness.

This is classic "kiddie lit" and by today's standard, very unsophisticated. I enjoyed what used to be but I am glad for the maturing of what is now offered to young readers.

I love these books. I wish I had read them growing up, but I'm so happy to have read them at all. This was the second time I've read these and I was moved by different things this time around, but still moved. I love these characters so much. Thanks to all of you who are participating in the readalong and I am greatly enjoying seeing the other videos people have created about these books.

The winter has been so dreary that I decided to spend some time in a childhood favorite. I’m glad I did.

It was fun to reread the first four Betsy-Tacy books, which I haven’t read since I was a girl. They’re just the kind of old-fashioned story that I loved as a kid, and they were just as charming reading them with an adult’s eyes.