My most recent young adult series reread was the Betsy-Tacy series, by Maud Hart Lovelace. It wasn't officially a reread because I hadn't read all the books before. The entire series, ten books, was reissued about six years ago in new editions with forwards by contemporary women writers. At that time, I purchased the last four books in two volumes and read them. I liked them well enough that I planned to some day buy the first six and read the whole series through, which I just now got around to.
It's an interesting series to read as an adult, because the main character, Betsy Ray, is an adult by the end but only five years old in the beginning. It's the kind of series I'd have liked to grow up with. I'm fairly certain I read one or two of the earlier books as a kid, but none of Betsy's adventures were memorable enough for me to know for sure. This time around, I really enjoyed the books about the younger Betsy. She and her best friends, Tacy and Tib, are precocious, imaginative, and brave, and the world is a lovely place seen through their eyes.
There is some timeless wisdom in these stories as well, as early as the second book, Betsy-Tacy and Tib. The chapter titled "Being Good" is about how the girls form a club called The Christian Kindness Club, whose purpose is to encourage them to be good. They decide to punish themselves for being bad by carrying marble bags around their necks and putting pebbles in every time they do something wrong. This works well for a few minutes, "but it was such fun putting stones in their bags. They grew naughtier and naughtier." In the end, Tib concludes that their club didn't make them good, it made them bad. There's some deep theology in that. Another highlight for me in the earliest books is Betsy's receiving permission to take a weekly trip to the library. I can get in the car and go to the library anytime I want, but in Betsy's story, I felt like a kid being allowed to walk there for the first time by myself. And that's just one argument for why adults should read young adult lit: at its best, it not only reminds us of the rites of passage we experienced, but actually makes us feel like we're experiencing them again.
Many things change between the first and second volumes of Betsy's adventures. A new illustrator creates a sleeker, more sophisticated portrait of Betsy and her friends; they leap middle school and enter high school in Heaven to Betsy; and the stories are longer and geared toward an older audience, naturally. Heaven to Betsy is a standout in the chronicles of Betsy's high school life; otherwise, she comes off as a tad frivolous and immature. She comes from a wealthy, loving family in whom is no visible dysfunction. She is a good student and well-liked. Her problems range from boys who don't return the intensity of her feelings for them to the loss of the school essay contest because she thought too highly of herself and didn't adequately prepare. Betsy's life is so nondescript that the first title of the third volume is called, simply, Betsy Was a Junior. And that's pretty much all she is.
Luckily, there's Heaven to Betsy, the primary plotline of which is Betsy and her sister Julia trying to decide whether to continue attending the Baptist church with their family or to convert to the Episcopal church. They've both been singing in the Episcopal choir and find the style of worship at that church more to their liking. Given the social capital attached to one's church membership in the early 20th century, they are understandably fearful about their father's response. He surprises them by being quite agreeable. He acknowledges his daughters' age and their ability to decide these kinds of things for themselves. He encourages them to be good and faithful members of whatever church they choose. He admonishes them, "'It isn't enough to go to church, and to support the church. It's down in your own heart. Religion is in your thoughts, and in the way you act from day to day, and in the way you treat other people. It's honesty, and unselfishness, and kindness. Especially kindness.'" In all this, there is no mention of the truth of the gospel, but again, church had more to do with social standing in this culture. I appreciated the lack of convention in this storyline.
Toward the end of her high school years, Betsy redeems herself a bit by realizing that she has not always acted her age. As their junior year comes to a close, she, Tib, and Tacy stay up all night trying to complete a biology project they should have started weeks ago. They realize that it was a project they wanted to do and that they robbed themselves of the opportunity to do it well by putting it off. "'As a matter of fact,'" says Tib, "'we've had a pretty foolish year. You and I especially, Betsy. It's been fun, and I guess it's been worth it but I wouldn't want another year this foolish' ... 'Me either,' said Betsy." It's nice that they come to this conclusion, but they are still quite sheltered and lack a lot of self-awareness.
This is never clearer than in Betsy and the Great World, when Betsy, now age 21, drops out of college and travels Europe on her father's dime in order to gain experiences that will help her in her career as a writer. She is afraid of the "foreign" people she encounters on some of the islands along her cruise route and spends money like it will never run out. Her father owns a shoe store, so it's hard to fully understand this extravagance. I guess being middle class meant something different at the dawn of World War I. Betsy attracts male attention everywhere she goes, but she still pines for her high school love, Joe Willard. No matter whom she meets, she can't seem to give in to any of them. "Something inside you told you when you didn't love a person, just as ... something ... told you when you did, even though he was thousands of miles away and you could hardly bear to think about him because you'd probably lost him." Before my husband came along, it used to annoy me so much when people said things like that. But now I understand it. Betsy finally writes Joe a letter from London toward the end of her stay, and he responds to her via a column in the London Times.
They are reunited on American soil at the beginning of the final book, Betsy's Wedding. Joe proposes immediately, despite the fact that they have been separated for years and hardly know one another anymore. But as Betsy says, when you know you know. The titular wedding occurs early in the book, and the rest of the story is more about settling into married life. There is a lot of truth in their finding one another out and in Betsy's desire to find a husband for dear Tib, who is simply too independent for her own good. Feminism has no place in any of these relationships, but that doesn't mean Joe has no respect for his wife's voice. Their relationship is modern in its way even if it's still a product of its time.
My expectations for how I'd feel reading this series were not quite met. When I read all of Anne of Green Gables a couple of years ago, I was so swept up in Anne's experiences and found them both memorable and instructional. Betsy's didn't leave me with that same feeling. I'll read them again in a few years and see how I feel. Maybe by then I'll have my own little one to read them with.
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