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.

why are my eyes leaking

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.

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!

Just so wonderful.

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.

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.

"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. :)

The author writes a novel based on her Jr. year in high school in a small town in Minnesota in the early 1900's. The story is full of all sorts of fun times with Betsy and her many friends. Lessons of life and relationships are learned when some of Betsy's well-meant plans go awry, and she learns that "there was more to growing up than drinking coffee.." This is a great book for a middle-school/high school girl. With all its almost silliness, valuable lessons of life are inserted throughout.

Maybe my favorite Betsy-Tacy so far.

Much talk about growing up.

"We're actually juniors," she said, "stopping in for coffee after shopping, not freshmen or sophomores pretending to be juniors stopping in for coffee after shopping."

"Betsy had the same uncanny feeling of being grown-up she had when she and Tacy and Tib drank their coffee at Heinz's. It couldn't be, she thought unbelievingly, that they were sitting in the Opera House at night, downstairs, with boys who had paid for their tickets! But they were."

Betsy writes out her resolutions at the beginning of her junior year: Stay at home more and take Julia's place around the house, learn the piano, be class officer in school, head up a committee for the junior-senior banquet, win the essay contest, and finally get Joe Willard to go out with her.
Well, as resolutions usually go, most of the plans go "aft agley."

Major mess-ups to the plan-Joe likes Phyllis this year. Betsy and her friends neglect an important biology assignment and stay up the entire night before it's due to try to turn something in. Betsy neglects to look after her little sister, resulting in singed eyelashes. Betsy embarrasses herself in front of the class by writing an unpleasant note about a teacher and getting caught. Betsy burns her hair with a curling iron right before a dance. Last, but not least, creating a sorority and then a fraternity, made up of her closest friends. This last foray into snobbishness costs Betsy a chairmanship on the junior-senior banquet committee, being the junior pick for the essay contest, and almost several friendships, including her old crush Tony, who abandons the crowd and starts to run with a wild bunch.

Betsy does some soul-searching at the end of the school year.

"All those resolutions she had made on Babcock's Bay! How they had been smashed to smithereens! She wondered whether life consisted of making resolutions and breaking them, of climbing up and slipping down. 'I believe that's it,' she thought. 'And the bright side of it is that you never slip down to quite the point you started climbing from. You always gain a little. This year I've gained music lessons, and all the things Miss Fowler taught me about writing, and a postal card from Joe.' That seemed funny to her and she laughed, but she grew serious again. She thought about those lists she had made in her programs for self-improvement. She hadn't followed them out by any means, but they had revealed her ideals."

"It came to her that there was more to growing up than drinking coffee at Heinz's"

"'We're growing up,' Betsy said aloud. She wasn't even sure she liked it. But it happened, and then it was irrevocable. There was nothing you could do about it except to try to see that you grew up into the kind of human being you wanted to be. 'I'd like to be a fine one,' Betsy thought quickly and urgently."

That's a good resolution.

I just don’t love the high school books as much as I love the ones from Betsy’s younger days, but I still plan on reading the whole series. It is interesting to see how very, very different high school was in 1907-1910 than it was when I went to high school. I’d have love to have been friends with Betsy and hung out at her house with the Crowd singing around the piano and eating “Sunday night lunch” (though I don’t know that I would have liked onion sandwiches). Anyway, I’m glad I read it, but I doubt I’ll read it again.

Read aloud with my girl. We adore this series!