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The Tune Is in the Tree

maud hart lovelace eloise wilkin

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Annie Jo was a little girl like any other little girl. She was just about as big, too, as any other little girl her age. She had pigtails and for best occasions a plaid silk dress. Her father was an aviator (so the birds had a special feeling for him), and when he was delayed one day, and her mother went to hunt for him, and Mrs. Bunch, the sitter, sprained her ankle, the birds took charge of Annie Jo.Miss Ruby, the hummingbird, who understood magic, made her two and a half inches high. She learned to fly and visited the Robins, the Warblers, and the Thrushes. The perfidious Mrs. Cowbird was causing trouble as usual, laying her eggs in other birds' nests. (Mrs. Cowbird is a notable villainness.) And Annie Jo lost her plaid silk dress in a very curious way. But she got another one in time for Mrs. Oriole's ball, which occurred on the day Annie Jo returned to her normal size and home.

177 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1,1950

This edition

Format
177 pages, Hardcover
Published
January 1, 1950 by Thomas Y. Crowell Company
ISBN
9789999363884
ASIN
9999363881
Language
English

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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(4.1 / 5.0, 12 votes)
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12 reviews All reviews
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Calcature
★ ★ ★ ★ ★
April 26,2025
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tRobert Ivan Shellenbarger
5.0 out of 5 stars Wonderful treasure of a book! So great it is available again! Great for any bird lover!
Reviewed in the United States on October 23, 2019
I am so delighted this book is available again! I became aware of Betsy-Tacy and was thus interested in Lovelace’s other work. I checked out a copy from the Library of Congress where I work. (The book has been very hard to find, very expensive to buy. My old copy is the most expensive book I ever purchased.) When I read it I thought, "What a treasure". It is a fantasy about a girl who lives a childhood dream of mine, living with the birds. I know I would have just loved this book when I was around twelve years old. The fantasy reminds me of L. Frank Baum’s Oz stories, where magic is like a science. The author shows a real knowledge of bird species and bird behavior, which really makes the book such a treasure. She finds inspiration for human life as well. The title, by the way, is from a poem by Emily Dickinson. Any bird lover or lover of nature literature should buy this
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thelostone
★ ★ ★ ★ ★
April 26,2025
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A sweet story about a girl who, quite fantastically, is cared for by birds while her parents are detained.
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Basic_otaku
★ ★ ★ ★ ★
April 26,2025
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Such a lovely story! I wish it wasn't out of print!
(I've shelved it under "homeschooling" because in addition to being a good story in and of itself, it effortlessly teaches plenty of factual details about birds. Yes, there are bits of fantasy woven in--such as the ovenbird baking cookies in her oven-like nest--but they're good springboards for conversation, observation, and research.)
An excellent read-aloud for children ages 4 through 9 or so.
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Orderer
★ ★ ★ ★ ★
April 26,2025
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3.5 stars

This was a fun little read. Not one that I’ll read over and over again, but really cute. Plus, it has so many bird facts! I’m not even a bird person, but I was literally looking up all the birds that were named in the book, just to see if their actual characteristics matched with they did in the book...and they did!
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Veldimburg
★ ★ ★ ★ ★
April 26,2025
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Sometimes, you make it halfway through a library book, and put it down just so you can order your own copy. The Tune is in the Tree is one of those sorts of books. It's sweet and lovely and utterly delightful. I went into it knowing nothing about the book, just knowing that I enjoyed Lovelace's Betsy-Tacy books. It was a bit of a surprise to find that the all the secondary characters were birds, but the surprise was by no means unpleasant.

Annie Jo, a little girl of... perhaps six? seven? finds herself accidentally left alone, and the birds that frequent her garden come to the rescue. She is promptly shrunk down to two inches by the magic-wielding Miss Ruby Hummingbird, and spends a while as a guest in various nests. Lovelace seamlessly weaves bits of bird knowledge into the story, which will delight budding ornithologists.

It's not the sort of book that will appeal to children who have been raised on a diet of explosions and flashy, plot-driven books. It will require a reader who is content in quiet and gentle narratives. But it's sweet and lovely and everything I want in our family library.
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TimeFliesAway
★ ★ ★ ★ ★
April 26,2025
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Birds of a feather flock together. The cowbird “doesn’t make a nest of her own…She flies around all spring as free as air. And when it comes time to lay an egg, she simply lays it in someone else’s next…And never…comes back to it again. She’s so perfidiously clever…that she chooses the nest of someone whose babies feed on the same sort of food her babies like.” The cowbird is described as mean and horrid and its egg as selfish. “It never fails…Once a cowbird, always a cowbird. You hatch ‘em. You raise ‘em. You teach ‘em to fly. And then as soon as their own calls, off they go, with never so much as a thank you.”

I could not help but compare the Cowbird in The Tune Is in the Tree by Maud Hart Lovelace with Annette in The Summer Place by Jennifer Weiner and contrast the fixed mindset and patriarchy of the 1930s with the growth mindset and feminism nearly a century later:

“Maybe this was progress. Her mother…hadn’t wanted children, but had had them anyhow. [She] hadn't wanted children, and had had one, but she’d known enough to walk away so that [her daughter] could be raised by her father and her stepmother, a woman who…had wanted kids…Maybe she represented the final stage in…women’s evolution; the one who would reject marriage and motherhood completely…A little selfishness could be healthy. It could even save your life. That…was a message more girls and women could stand to hear, a thing that few were ever taught.”

I was also struck by the parallel between the Cowbird and the Good Samaritan (Luke 10:25-37). Like the priest who passes on the other side of the road, the Robins throw the egg out. Like the Levite who walks by, the Yellow Warblers bury the egg beneath a second story. But like the Samaritan who approaches the mistreated man with compassion, the Thrushes adopt and raise the maligned chick as their own. Upon hatching his first words are “I knew I was something special.” As is Maud Hart Lovelace’s 1930s novella.

Lovelace chooses the best illustrators to complement her work. Betsy Tacy transitions from Lois Lenski to Vera Neville, while The Tune Is in the Tree’s quaint charm is sprinkled with black-and-white illustrations by Golden Book’s Eloise Wilkins. The plot’s tune echoes from the final Betsy-Tacy book, Betsy's Wedding: "I think I'll write a story about a little girl going to live with the birds." True to character, Maud Hart Lovelace brought biographical Betsy’s seed of an idea to life. Before the Betsy Tacy series was born, Lovelace wrote The Tune Is in the Tree (1930), and it was published after the series was complete in 1950. Although it is out of circulation today, it forever remains a rare gem!
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Eclipsa
★ ★ ★ ★ ★
April 26,2025
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This was ever so sweet. Betsy in one of the Besty Tacy novels plans to write a story of a little girl who goes to live with the birds.

I'm glad to see that Maud did write it. It's very cozy and sweet.
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kiataryu
★ ★ ★ ★ ★
April 26,2025
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Recently re-published by Minnesota Heritage Publishing, I'm glad I now have my own copy. Essential reading for the MHL canon? No, but I'm bumping up my 2008 rating to at least 3.5 stars. It's a sweet story demonstrating Maud's love of the natural world.

8-21-2008:
Laurie generously checked this out of the Seattle Public Library for me, and I raced to finish it before I left town. Cute story about little Annie Jo who goes to live with the woodland birds for awhile. Maud's love and appreciation for nature shines through, but it's not her strongest work and is not essential reading.
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