Beyond the Classics
Posted by Arwen Mosher in Family on Thursday, March 12, 2009 6:16 PM
When I was younger I sometimes wished I’d been born 90 years earlier.
That would have made me the class of 1910, just like Maud Hart Lovelace. I wanted to be Maud Hart Lovelace. Or, more to the point, I wanted to be Betsy Ray, the autobiographical main character of Lovelace’s Betsy-Tacy books.
There is plenty of bad fiction being written for young people this days; it takes only a quick survey of the “young adult” section of a bookstore to confirm that. Surveying those shelves makes me shiver: it’s only going to be worse in another ten years, and what is my daughter going to read then?
Well, the classics, obviously. L.M. Montgomery, Jane Austen, Charlotte Bronte. I hope she’ll also like Lewis and Tolkien and L’Engle and other authors I’ve enjoyed.
But I’ve found that twelve-year-old girls might appreciate classics but they also want books that are more frivolous, that deal with the minutiae of daily life. Books to which they can relate their own experiences as daughters and sisters, students and friends. This is where Betsy and Tacy come in.
Maud Hart Lovelace based the Betsy-Tacy
Lovelace paints a picture of a happy, vibrant family life in the Ray home. In the relationship between Betsy and Tacy she shows a beautiful, healthy friendship between two young girls. In the books about Betsy’s high school days she details Betsy’s adventures - both social and scholastic - so that the first decade of the last century seems like a wonderful time to have lived. And she does it all in a manner that is satisfactorily wholesome (for the parents) and satisfactorily fun (for the girls reading)!
I have many friends who have read the Betsy-Tacy books and without exception we all love them. I bet your daughter will too!
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