My parents gave me the second through fourth books of Maud Hart Lovelace’s Betsy-Tacy series for Christmas, thus completing my collection, and since I ended up spending a few days of my visit to Minnesota cozily snowed in, I decided I’d might as well reread them for the first time in years. Unsurprisingly, they were all charming and hugely enjoyable, following the three friends from ages eight to twelve. The girls try to learn to fly, cook “Everything Pudding” (throwing every ingredient in the kitchen into one horrible concoction; I tried this as a child myself!), form a secret society, cut off one another’s hair to make memory lockets after Tacy has diphtheria, meet Tib’s glamorous Aunt Dolly (who reappears in Betsy in Spite of Herself), write a letter to the King of Spain, explore “Little Syria,” see their first horseless carriage, hang out with sassy Winona Root (a member of the Crowd in the high-school books), befriend Mrs. Poppy (later Julia’s voice teacher), perform in a play of Rip Van Winkle, find Betsy’s long-lost actor uncle Keith (whose trunk becomes her writing desk in subsequent books), and go to a library for the first time (and meet Miss Sparrow, Betsy’s beloved librarian in the rest of the series).
But I had a weird revelation: I remember reading Betsy-Tacy and Tib over and over again as a kid, but Big Hill seemed only vaguely familiar, and I began to suspect that I’d only read Downtown once before. Given how much I loved the rest of the series, how much I loved series books in general, and what a voracious reader I was, I’m not entirely sure how this happened. It could be that I genuinely didn’t like Big Hill and Downtown, preferring to skip from the classic early books to the fascinating and sophisticated high-school ones. But I think it was more complex than that. Of course, like most children, I paid little attention to the vagaries of publication dates, bibliographies, card catalog entries, and such; I got my information about which book to read next from the order that the books appeared on the shelf, or the list of other books on the back cover. At the time, the Betsy-Tacy books weren’t being as clearly marketed as a series (Harper Collins now puts numbers on the spines), or at least the library copies I had access to were less uniform. Somehow I got it in my head that Big Hill and Downtown were simply lesser books, derivative spin-offs, rather than legitimate, chronological entries in a series. Rereading them now, I was surprised to see how many elements introduced in them reappear in the later books (as noted above), and how subtly Lovelace elevates the reading level as the characters mature. I’d always thought as the high-school books representing a huge break from the childishness of the earlier books, but now I see that these books are a natural bridge. I’m so happy to have been reintroduced to them.
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