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Betsy-Tacy #7

Betsy Was a Junior

maud hart lovelace vera neville anna quindlen

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A small town shortly after the turn of the century provides the background for this account of Betsy's third year at Deep Valley High. Reissue.

320 pages, Paperback

First published June 1,1947
Series
Betsy-Tacy
Places
mankato, deep valley minnesota, 

This edition

Format
320 pages, Paperback
Published
March 31, 1995 by HarperTrophy
ISBN
9780064405478
ASIN
0064405478
Language
English

More editions

About the author

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maud hart lovelace

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Maud Hart Lovelace was born on April 25, 1892, in Mankato, Minnesota. She was the middle of three children born to Thomas and Stella (Palmer) Hart. Her sister, Kathleen, was three years older, and her other sister, Helen, was six years younger. “That dear family" was the model for the fictional Ray family.

Maud's birthplace was a small house on a hilly residential street several blocks above Mankato's center business district. The street, Center Street, dead-ended at one of the town's many hills. When Maud was a few months old, the Hart family moved two blocks up the street to 333 Center.

Shortly before Maud's fifth birthday a “large merry Irish family" moved into the house directly across the street. Among its many children was a girl Maud's age, Frances, nicknamed Bick, who was to be Maud's best friend and the model for Tacy Kelly.

Tib's character was based on another playmate, Marjorie (Midge) Gerlach, who lived nearby in a large house designed by her architect father. Maud, Bick, and Midge became lifelong friends. Maud once stated that the three couldn't have been closer if they'd been sisters.

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Community Reviews

Rating(3.9 / 5.0, 100 votes)
5 stars
31(31%)
4 stars
27(27%)
3 stars
42(42%)
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100 reviews All reviews
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Heleted_Dash
★ ★ ★ ★ ★
April 26,2025
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I'm sure I'm just becoming a grinchy communist in my old age, but the amount of money that must have gone into the clothes and parties in this book (in America in 1909!) made me see the sorority plot in a different light. On the surface Betsy learns not to be exclusive, but let's face it, to keep up with the Crowd you'd need quite a lot of clothes and free time (and her parents, throwing three-day parties that surely her guests would feel the need to reciprocate), so she was already living an exclusive sort of social life. It rang kind of hollow for me.

Also, parties in books are much more fun when they happen only once or twice. I'm on Team Margaret.

Meh. There are some nice bits but I wasn't too engaged.
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PowerofWill2
★ ★ ★ ★ ★
April 26,2025
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Back to Besty who is now a junior and continues to be full of grand ideas and games and things that always manage to never quite work out as she'd like them to.

Tib is back and it's lovely to have her around. I wasn't a huge fan of the sorority business, being of the same "it leaves people on the outside" mindset but I was able to get through it quite happily. I loved reading about Julia as she went off into the world.

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aikoofdarkwaters
★ ★ ★ ★ ★
April 26,2025
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Warm and fuzzy comfort reading, slightly less comfortable due to having to watch Betsy make a lot of teenager mistakes. It was a great autumn read with a cup of tea, and I am sad that I am starting to run out of these!
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lariescat
★ ★ ★ ★ ★
April 26,2025
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Oh Betsy.... lots of lessons for you this year. I'm glad that in the end you remembered yourself and your true dear friend, Tony, who always needed you and always knew that Fraternities and Sororities were a bad idea, for they left people out.
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Erenloli
★ ★ ★ ★ ★
April 26,2025
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Always loved this series - found this in the library! Fun to see the drawings of styles back then and fun to read. Many hijinks ensue and multiple Valuable Lessons About Life are learned.
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Duhuhu
★ ★ ★ ★ ★
April 26,2025
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"After all, you couldn't go through life rolling all your friendships into one gigantic snowball. You wanted different friendships with different kinds of people. You ought not to fo through life, or even a small section of high school or college, with your friendships fenced by snobbish artificial barriers."
Somehow this is my least favorite Betsy book. Don’t get me wrong, I love it, but it doesn’t feel as happy. Which it probably isn’t. Maybe it’s the drama over the sorority, or the fact that Betsy didn’t fall in love in this book (Dave Hunt doesn’t count). I don’t know. I get it though. In the last two books, there’s just party after party and they’re all full of fun. And while that is somewhat true of this book, it’s also a lot more serious. They’re all growing up. Which actually fits my stage of life right now, and I’m not mad about it. :)
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