This is my most frequent recommendation. I love the Betsy-Tacy series, best described as Anne of Green Gables set in Minnesota. I do not know why this book isn’t more popular. Please! Please! someone make an TV series based on these books.

Maud Hart Lovelace is one of my all-time comfort authors. I discovered the Betsy-Tacy books when I was high school, so I never read the younger books - I just stuck with the older ones, which follow Betsy through high school into her world travels and then marriage.

Betsy Ray and Tacy Kelly met at Betsy's 5th birthday party and have been best friends ever since. They live in the picturesque small town Deep Valley, Minnesota in the early 1900s (high school class 1910). Part of the charm of these books are the illustrations that pull you right into the period. Over Betsy and Tacy's progress through high school, you can follow their corresponding change in fashion from sailor suits to full-skirted ball dresses to slinkier sheath dresses. Style-conscious Betsy starts putting up her hair in a fashionable pompadour, but Tacy insists on keeping her hair in coronet braids. They see movies for a nickel at the Majestic. They travel in buggies pulled by horses until autos become more common.

The books tell of Betsy's struggles and triumphs and general good times. Supporting her unfailingly through it all is her family - her social, pretty mother, her devoted, benevolent father, her ambitious older sister, Julia, and her stately younger sister, Margaret. Family traditions include Sunday night lunches for which Mr. Ray makes his famous sandwiches, trips to the lake where Mr. and Mrs. Ray first met and fell in love, and muffins on the first day of school.

Betsy is a friendly, outgoing girl, and she makes lots of friends in her high school. If the only things I knew about high school came from the Betsy-Tacy books, I would want to go. Lovelace wrote a separate book, Carney's House Party, about Betsy's friend Carney Sibley.

I am seeing Betsy through High School this time The last time I read the Betsy-Tacy books, I stopped after Betsy -Tacy goes downtown because I thought the high school one would be boring. I enjoyed this book .I loved the friendships though I missed seeing Tib.I really want to eat some fudge now

I was underwhelmed with Boy Crazy Betsy in this instalment. Tacy hardly gets a look in because Betsy is so busy partying without her; oh, Betsy sometimes (sometimes!) gets together with her erstwhile bestie, but it's mostly so she can do all the talking about her latest mash and how she feels and what she said and did. These get-togethers are told in about two sentences each. It is mentioned that Tacy doesn't really care...but Betsy's so busy playing one boy off against another or mooning over the unattainable guy that she doesn't notice. Not only that, but I'm sorry to say that for all her supposed religious feeling, she's a bit of a fake in this book--pretending to enjoy things she actually hates (like skating) so she can be with the "in crowd" and clock up some more boy time, and "laughing her hardest" when she wishes she were somewhere else. Ick. It reminded me very much of Anne Shirley at Queens--and that is not a compliment.
I did enjoy the descriptions of the home and family activities, but Betsy herself was just tiresome, as if this were a novel based on Grease or some 1950s story out of "Calling All Girls". I hope the next volume improves or I'm done here.

3.5 stars. I didn't love this as much as the previous four books, but it may not be the book's fault as much my own. First of all, I expected the book to be a comfort read, but most of it was about the disappointments and growing pains of Betsy's first year of high school. So I suffered along with our heroine!

Secondly, I'm more like Tacy than Betsy when it came to being crazy about boys. Sure, I had crushes, but I was never all-consumed with getting a boyfriend in my high school days. I was frustrated with Betsy for being so shallow in this area, but it comes out alright in the end.

Overall I enjoyed Lovelace's good storytelling and Betsy's growth in wisdom. The author did a beautiful job of showing her growth in faith without being preachy, which is no easy feat.

On to the sequel!

High school may have been heaven to Betsy, but this book was purgatory to me. I'm astonished by all of the high ratings, when this was so repetitive, dull, and full of shallow, annoying, boy-crazy behavior. I know that a lot of people love this series and deeply connect to it from their childhoods, but it took me over a week to plod through it, and I was expecting far more dissenting voices here on Goodreads.

First, some backstory for my experience.

Back in the day, Mom had my older sister stop reading the Betsy-Tacy series when she got to this book, because Mom saw mention of a Ouija board in the table of contents and was concerned. As it turns out, the Ouija board only appears for the purpose of stirring up even more boy drama, and black magic doesn't play any kind of role in the story. The Ouija board simply tells Betsy that "trouble" is coming, and her one-track mind assumes that this must have to do with her love life.

It's just as well that Mom nixed this book based on the little that she knew, because Lovelace wrote this to a decidedly older audience, and it transitions the series from juvenile chapter books to YA novels. This isn't something Mom would have wanted my sister to read anyway, and nor is it something that my sister would have enjoyed, since almost the entire novel revolves around boy drama in one way or another.

When I was in elementary school, I stopped reading the series after book four, and even though I later went back to read some of the YA books in the series, this one was no longer available at my library at that time. I wasn't invested enough to inter-library loan it, so I never read it, but I purchased a cheap used copy recently so that I could continue reading the whole series to review it for a family friend. I can confidently say that with this title, I didn't miss out on anything.

The book starts out well, and the introduction of Joe Willard is simply delightful, with realistic teenage banter between him and Betsy as she shops at the store where he works. I loved this, since I always loved Joe in the later books that I read, but unfortunately, he drops out of the rest of the book, because he is far too mature and too busy trying to financially support himself to be involved in all of Betsy's nonsense or social circles at this age.

In this book, Betsy begins high school and gets involved in new social circles, but she is unbearably shallow and annoying. She is completely boy-crazy, and she is obsessed with her appearance, wanting to be as thin, beautiful, and alluring as possible. The book promotes a lot of damaging views of body image, because even though the author doesn't say anything bad herself, Betsy's immature, fourteen-year-old obsession with thinness never gets counterbalanced or corrected.

There are some enjoyable chapters in the book, like one that focuses on a family trip for Betsy's parents' anniversary, but the majority of the book cycles through school, church, and home activities involving "The Crowd," Betsy's new high school friends. The boys mainly want to be friends, and are nice kids, but Betsy feels self-important for having this male attention, and wants to string along any chance she has to be admired. Parts of the book are very repetitive, and the manufactured drama about Betsy's love life reminds me how much I have never liked teenagers, whether I was five, fifteen, or now almost twenty-five.

Also, previous characters mostly drop out of the story. Tib, my favorite character, had moved to Milwaukee with her family, so she is out of the picture, and Tacy is severely sidelined by Betsy's new friends. Every time Tacy comes into the story, it is just so that Betsy can tell her in detail about all of her new adventures with other people, and so that Tacy can stroke Betsy's ego about how popular she is, and how great it is that she's stringing at least two boys along, even though Tacy herself isn't interested in boys. She is a long-suffering saint in this novel, and never gets her due. She's merely there to prop up Betsy's ego and maintain their friendship so that she can have good times again once Betsy matures.

The book also involves a subplot about Betsy and her older sister considering changing their denominational affiliation from Baptist to Episcopalian. This begins because the sister, Julia, sings in the choir at the other church. The book manufactures fairly boring drama about this as well, with the girls feeling afraid to tell their father and putting it off for a long time. When they do tell him, he is somewhat disappointed but fine with it, and he reminds them that being a Christian is all about your behavior, morality, and kindness, not about a particular church affiliation.

This reinforces the series' overall view of Christianity as behavioral, rather than a relationship with God, and the girls' reasoning for changing churches is very shallow. It's all about how they feel, and even though it's fine and good for people to have preferences for different worship styles, the book presents this in an extremely self-focused way, without any thought of actual worship to God, versus personal feelings of religious excitement. This didn't add much depth to an already shallow book.

However, despite how much I disliked this book, I would not recommend that someone skip it when reading the series. Because this book introduces a ton of new characters and new situations, it is important for someone to read it to be able to understand and follow along with later books. I got by all right when I picked up later books in the series as a teenager, but there was a lot that I didn't have context for, and this book provides a lot of context for high school dynamics, people, family changes, and experiences that affect the later books.

Without a doubt my favourite book in the series, thank you Portsmouth Public Library for gifting me the original copy I read all those years ago (because no one else was checking it out). So many things I did as a child and still hold onto as an adult were from this book and I forgot. Such a delight.

I read the first four books when I was younger and have finally returned to my childhood friend! I am happy to say that she is delightful as ever in her high school years.
Betsy was always the most relatable heroine to me, despite the fact that her story is set more than a hundred years earlier than mine. She had many of the same ambitions and ideas as I did as a child, and I sympathized deeply with everything she did, no matter how ridiculous. In "Heaven to Betsy," the tone has changed just enough to show how Betsy is growing up, but is still full of the same charm as the earlier books.
The only reason I haven't given this book five stars is because Betsy gets a Ouija board for Christmas and the book portrays it as a harmless game. :(
Despite this, overall the book is fun and a wonderful continuation of Betsy's story.

When I read Carney's House Party earlier this year I liked it so much I wanted more, and this was the closest to more -- I often struggle with books from the perspective of children, so I did not want Betsy Ray's childhood stories, but the beginning of high school was just right. Very enjoyable, and surprising to me in the self-discovery around religion. I did not love how much Betsy was focused on boys, but Lovelace was writing from the truth of her own high school days, and there are characters such as Tacy to contrast.

I LOVE THIS BOOK SO MUCH. I read the first four Betsy-Tacy books when I was younger, and when I got older I found Heaven to Betsy and the rest of my the books. At the perfect time, too.
Betsy is just such a wonderful character. From writing to boys, it’s so perfect. The more I think about it she really does seem like a slightly more modern Jo March. Honestly, though (SPOILER) I never really liked Tony. I knew what was up.

Written by Maud Hart Lovelace and published in 1945, it follows Betsy Ray during her freshman year of high school in Deep Valley, Minnesota. This is actually the fifth book in a series about Betsy and her friends, as they grow up in the early twentieth century. The entire series exudes charm, and will make you wish you could travel back in time to spend an afternoon with the Ray family (seriously, that family knew how to have a good time). I especially loved all of the descriptions about food (fudge, pie, sandwiches, muffins, etc.) and seeing all of the fun Betsy and her friends (referred to as "The Crowd") got up to. It was also interesting to note what modern convenience were available in the United States at the turn of the century. This story of high school friendship, fun and romance was definitely a cinnamon roll read!⁣

This one makes me a bit melancholy, for it's a rather bittersweet read for me. Tib has moved to Milwaukee and Betsy and her family have moved into a new home away from Tacy and her family. Betsy and Tacy are now freshmen in highschool and experiencing so many changes and heartaches in this book. Sigh.... I prefer the first four books when Betsy, Tacy and Tib are girls together and Betsy and Tacy live across the street from each other. Still and all, it's an EXCELLENT book-- of course it is :-)

I do love how close the Ray family is. I also adore Julia and Betsy's relationship and Julia, Betsy and their mother's relationship and how they all gather together to discuss all the social events afterwards right before bedtime.