Read Ebook {PDF EPUB} Betsy Was a Junior A Betsy-Tacy High School Story by Betsy Was a Junior: A Betsy-Tacy High School Story by Maud Hart Lovelace. Maud Hart Lovelace, was born April 25, 1892, in Mankato, Minnesota.Like Betsy , Maud followed her mother around the house at age five asking questions such as “How do you spell ‘going down the street’?” for the stories she had already begun to write. Soon she was writing poems and plays. When Maud was ten, a booklet of her poems was printed; and by age eighteen, she had sold her first short story. The Hart family left Mankato shortly after Maud’s high school graduation in 1910 and settled in Minneapolis, where Maud attended the University of Minnesota. In 1917, she married Delos W. Lovelace, a newspaper reporter who later became a popular writer of short stories. The Lovelaces’ daughter, Merian, was born in 1931. Maud would tell her daughter bedtime stories about her childhood, and it was these stories that gave her the idea of writing the Betsy-Tacy books. Maud did not intend to write an entire series when Betsy-Tacy , the first book, was published in 1940, but readers asked for more stories. So Maud took Betsy through high school and beyond college to the “great world” and marriage. The final book in the series, Betsy’s Wedding , was published in 1955. The Betsy-Tacy books are based very closely on Maud’s own life. “I could make it all up, but in these Betsy-Tacy stories, I love to work from real incidents,” Maud wrote. “The Ray family is a true portrayal of the Hart family. Mr. Ray is like Tom Hart; Mrs. Ray like Stella Palmer Hart; Julia like Kathleen; Margaret like Helen; and Betsy is like me, except that, of course, I glamorized her to make her a proper heroine.” Tacy and Tib are based on Maud’s real-life best friends, Frances “Bick” Kenney and Marjorie “Midge” Gerlach, and Deep Valley is based on Mankato. In fact, so much in the books was taken from real life that it is sometimes difficult to draw the line between fact and fiction. And through the years, Maud received a great deal of fan mail from readers who were fascinated by the question—what is true, and what is made up? The Betsy-Tacy Books by Maud Hart Lovelace: An Appreciation. Revisiting the Deep Valley novels by Maud Hart Lovelace (1892 – 1980) during the winter holiday season is a particular delight, though this American author’s stories can be enjoyed year-round. Perhaps better known as the Betsy-Tacy books, the themes celebrated in these nostalgic novels for young readers are universal: friendship, devotion, love of home, ambition, and comfort. Though the novels were published in the 1940s, they take place in the early years of the twentieth century, when the author herself was growing up. As young girls, her well-known heroines—Betsy, Tacy, and Tib—have ten cents to spend on Christmas shopping. As they grow up, in (1948), for instance, they have “real shopping” to do, but their trip downtown is as “heavily weighted with tradition as a Christmas pudding with plums.” They visit every store (including Cook’s Book Store) and price “everything from diamonds to gumdrops, and bought, each one, a Christmas tree ornament … savoring Christmas together all up and down Front Street.” It’s a simple and comforting ritual. Maud Hart Lovelace’s Betsy-Tacy books were based on her experiences growing up in Mankato, Minnesota. The Betsy-Tacy Companion by Sharla Scannell Whalen even contains a helpful chart that displays the names of the novels’ main characters alongside their real-life corollaries. But the enduring appeal of this series rests as much with their invented elements as their real-life, autobiographical links. Learn more about Maud Hart Lovelace ...... Friendship. In real life, Betsy is Maud Hart Lovelace, the author herself. Tacy is Anna Anastacia’s nickname; she was based on Maud’s friend Frances ‘Bick’ Kenny. They meet at Betsy’s (and Maud’s) fifth birthday party. In Betsy-Tacy (1940), they decorate eggs for Easter, with the help of older sisters Julia and Katie. They walk to school together every morning, even when it’s so cold and snowy that their hands ache inside their mittens. They dream of buying the chocolate-colored house, when they earn two nickels—but eventually, Tib moves in. The actual chocolate-colored house was much like Tib’s house (Tib was based on Maud’s friend Midge Gerlach), except that there was no tower, and in this volume, there’s no Tib, either. (Another neighborhood house did have a tower though. Wasn’t it Toni Morrison who said that one must write the stories one yearns to read? One must write about houses with towers, too, then.) Betsy and Tacy accommodate Tib, naturally. In Betsy-Tacy and Tib (1941), the girls are eight years old and fast friends: “Tib was always pointing things out. But Betsy and Tacy liked her just the same.” This allows readers to adjust to Tib’s presence, to create a space for her, just as the other girls do. Tib is the smallest and, arguably, the sharpest. She is also the best at flying, as the girls come to learn. Because even though it was Betsy’s idea, Betsy invents a story to tell, rather than take the plunge like the other two girls did (reluctantly but determinedly). Even so, the friends are inseparable. Devotion. Beyond the celebrated central friendship between the three girls, there are other sustained friendships. For instance, between Betsy’s and Tacy’s older sisters, and the friendships between the principle girls and certain neighborhood boys (some of whom—like Cab Edwards—remind me of Laurie in Louisa May Alcott ’ s Little Women stories). Friendship almost seems too simplistic a concept in Maud Hart Lovelace’s books: these are dedicated, lifelong relationships. The loving and warm relationship between Betsy’s parents is based on observations of her own mother and father, Stella, and Tom. Although Jule and Bob Ray do not always see eye-to-eye in the series, their temperaments are even and their motives true; they enjoy one another’s company consistently (with many jokes and much good-natured teasing). The series’ final volume, B etsy’s Wedding (1955) has Betsy’s fiancé declaring: “I want to be married to you and have you around all the time. I want to come home to you after work and tell you about my day. I want to hear you humming around, doing housework. I want to support you. I want to do things for you. If we were married and I was coming home to you tonight, I wouldn’t care if we had just bread and milk.” But there are other instances of loyalty and commitment in the series as well: support offered to relatives near and far, parents sacrificing to ensure that a child can pursue her talents, teachers who monitor Betsy’s progress and offer appropriate opportunities, the librarian who makes regular recommendations to the budding writer, and Anna, the cook, who leaves a well-established family to work for the Ray family instead (in real life, there was an Anna, but she did not stay long with the Hart family). Love of home. (1945) opens with Betsy spending two weeks of the summer holiday away from home; she stays with the Taggart family on a nearby farm, to put some color in her cheeks. At fourteen years old, this is her first independent visit and her homesickness is overwhelming. When she finally returns, she learns that the Ray family is leaving Hill Street behind and moving to a new house at the “windy junction” of High Street and Plum Street: “Betsy thought her heart would break. Didn’t they know how much she loved that coal stove beside which she had read so many books while the tea kettle sang and the little flames leaped behind the isinglass window?” It’s not just the Ray family that calls Deep Valley and its environs home. When the girls enjoy a private picnic the summer they turn ten, they discover a community of newcomers within walking distance in Betsy and Tacy Go over the Big Hill (1942) . In Little Syria, and they meet a girl close to their age. In Little Syria, the food and drink are unfamiliar to the girls: people smoke and play flutes, give the girls raisins and figs for snacks, and sign their names in Arabic. But not everyone in Deep Valley is accepting and when Naifi is bullied. Tib (then Tacy and, finally, Betsy) intervene: “I’m glad Tib stood up for the little Syrian girl. Foreign people should not be treated like that. America is made up of foreign people. Both of Tib’s grandmothers came from the other side. Perhaps when they got off the boat they looked a little strange too.” Ambition. Even though Betsy travels in her sister’s footsteps in the series’ penultimate volume — Betsy and the Great World (1952) — it’s her older sister, Julia, who is passionate about the arts and pursuing a career in opera. Julia dreams of exploring Europe the way that the younger girls dreamed of exploring the other side of the hill. In Betsy in Spite of Herself (1946), Betsy observes that Julia seems to belong to the Great World already, that courting and her beau will not be the end of her personal story. Julia’s passion is opera: “The next was La Boheme ! I saw Geraldine Farrar come in with her candle. I heard her sing ‘ Mi chiamano Mimi .’ Oh, Bettina how I cried! And I knew then. Cavalleria and Pagliacci only made me surer, and so did Aïda , although that’s pretty hard, too. Not like Wagner, of course. He’s just the ultimate.” Betsy’s dedication to her writing has a similar prominence and her parents celebrate her efforts as seriously as they support Julia’s ambitions. The first book in which her writing is central is Betsy and Tacy Go Downtown (1943), which is often cited as a favorite in the series (perhaps as much for Miss Poppy’s colorful personality, with her husband owning the Melborn Hotel and running the theater). “Betsy waved to the big desk. ‘I write stories,’” Betsy exclaims later in the series. Comfort. The Rays and readers salivate when Anna takes the position of the family’s cook: her cinnamon buns are legendary and she bakes a mean ginger cookie too. When a Ray daughter returns from a trip, she can expect any number of indulgences: “Anna’s muffins, and the choicest jams and jellies her mother had put up over the summer.” Throughout the series, picnic fixings and the ritual of Mr. Ray’s sandwich nights (onion and vinegar concoctions on Sundays, designed to give the women a break from cooking) are a pleasure. A summer picnic might be like this: “They set out on one of the long tables potato salad, potted meat, sandwiches, hard-boiled eggs, a chocolate cake, a cocoanut cake, and a jug of lemonade.” (There are winter picnics too.) And, for special occasions, at the Moorish Café, the family enjoys “oyster cocktails, and then soup, and then fish, and then turkey, and then salad, and then dessert … pie, ice cream or Delmonico pudding.” Mrs. Taggart packs a fine lunch for Betsy for her trip home: “It was magnificent; ham sandwiches, dill pickles, hard-boiled eggs, a chunk of layer cake and cookies.” Betsy and her friend, Bonnie, raid the Andrews’ icebox for “cheese, apples, olives, cookies, cold ham, and some of Mrs. Andrews’ famous little mince pies” to have a hen party, complete with Ouija board. And there are remarkable banana splits at Heinz’s Restaurant and evening gatherings with freshly made fudge. As the series wends on, the girls become old enough to host their own gatherings. While her parents are away, in Betsy Was a Junior (1947), Betsy,Tacy, and Tib hurry home from school, put on their party dresses, and host: “Balancing plates full of chicken salad, hot rolls, World’s Fair pickles and coffee, and second plates with ice cream and angel food cake, they nevertheless found time to smile at the mothers of their friends. Boys’ mothers were particularly fascinating.” All of this nourishes the girls’ bellies but also the appetites of readers who are longing for a comfortable and warming retreat from present-day realities. And it’s even more lovely knowing that so much of this is drawn from the author’s personal experiences. “I could make it all up,” she explains, “but in these Betsy-Tacy stories, I love to work from real incidents.” Contributed by Marcie McCauley , a graduate of the University of Western Ontario and the Humber College Creative Writing Program. She writes and reads (mostly women writers!) in Toronto, Canada. And she chats about it on Buried In Print and @buriedinprint . More about the Betsy-Tacy books. The Betsy-Tacy Society Wikipedia Reader discussion of Maud Hart Lovelace books on Goodreads. *These are Bookshop Affiliate and Amazon Affiliate links. If a product is purchased by linking through, Literary Ladies Guide receives a modest commission, which helps maintain our site and helps it to continue growing! Maud Hart Lovelace the Betsy Tacy Set. Paperback. Condition: New. Reprint. Language: English. Brand new Book. I never grow tired of cheering for Emily, and neither will a new generation of readers.--Mitali Perkins, author of You Bring the Distant Near, finalist for the National Book AwardThis standalone novel by the author of the beloved Betsy-Tacy series, Emily of Deep Valley is set in Betsy Ray's Deep Valley and tells the story of a young woman who longs to go off to college following her high school graduation, but whose family commitments demand she stay close to home. Resigning herself to a lost winter, Emily nonetheless throws herself into a new program of study and a growing interest in the local Syrian immigrant community, and when she meets a handsome new teacher at the high school, gains more than she ever dreamed possible. Maud Hart Lovelace's only young adult standalone novel, Emily of Deep Valley is considered to be one of the author's finest works. This edition includes a foreword by acclaimed young adult author Mitali Perkins, compelling historical material about the real people who inspired Lovelace's beloved characters and a biography of illustrator Vera Neville, whose original cover illustration is featured on the cover. "I re-read these books every year." --Laura Lippman"There are three authors whose body of work I have reread more than once over my adult life: Charles Dickens, Jane Austen and Maud Hart Lovelace." --Anna Quindlen. Emily of Deep Valley (Paperback) Maud Hart Lovelace. Published by William Morrow & Company, United States, 2010. New - Softcover Condition: New. Paperback. Condition: New. Reprint. Language: English. Brand new Book. I never grow tired of cheering for Emily, and neither will a new generation of readers.--Mitali Perkins, author of You Bring the Distant Near, finalist for the National Book AwardThis standalone novel by the author of the beloved Betsy-Tacy series, Emily of Deep Valley is set in Betsy Ray's Deep Valley and tells the story of a young woman who longs to go off to college following her high school graduation, but whose family commitments demand she stay close to home. Resigning herself to a lost winter, Emily nonetheless throws herself into a new program of study and a growing interest in the local Syrian immigrant community, and when she meets a handsome new teacher at the high school, gains more than she ever dreamed possible. Maud Hart Lovelace's only young adult standalone novel, Emily of Deep Valley is considered to be one of the author's finest works. This edition includes a foreword by acclaimed young adult author Mitali Perkins, compelling historical material about the real people who inspired Lovelace's beloved characters and a biography of illustrator Vera Neville, whose original cover illustration is featured on the cover. "I re-read these books every year." --Laura Lippman"There are three authors whose body of work I have reread more than once over my adult life: Charles Dickens, Jane Austen and Maud Hart Lovelace." --Anna Quindlen. Growing Up Together. At the Betsy-Tacy Convention in Mankato, Minn., in 1997, I disgraced myself at the trivia contest. In front of my daughter, Josephine, then 7 years old, and several hundred similarly dedicated “Betsy-Tacy” fans, I answered the question “What was the decoration on Betsy Ray’s wedding cake?” with the very wrong answer: a bell. The cake was in fact decorated with a dove; the bell, it will be recalled, was hanging decoratively in the living room. This year, at the 2012 convention — “or, as I like to think of it,” the mistress of ceremonies declared, “the 102nd reunion of the Deep Valley High School Class of 1910!” — I would make no such mistake. In my preparatory rereading before our third Mankato trip together, Josephine delicately suggested, I might pay particular attention to the series’s nuptial and homemaking details. Deep Valley was the name Maud Hart Lovelace gave her hometown, Mankato, in the 10 Betsy-Tacy books she published between 1940 and 1955 but set much earlier, during the period of her own childhood. The first book, “Betsy-Tacy,” begins in 1897, when Betsy is about to turn 5, and the series continues through “Betsy’s Wedding” in 1917, with the world at war. All tell the story of an idyllic Midwestern girlhood, but also reflect the approach of the new century, from the first horseless carriages to the strutting soldiers at Betsy’s boardinghouse in Munich. Like similar evocations of an earlier age and more “innocent” comings-of-age, the Betsy-Tacy books engender an almost fanatical devotion. But there’s also a sense that as children’s series go, they have flown below the radar, never quite developing the recognition of “Little Women,” “Anne of Green Gables” and the “Little House” books. Perhaps it’s because there hasn’t been a movie or a TV show. The books’ big cinematic moment came only tangentially in Nora Ephron’s 1998 film “You’ve Got Mail,” when Meg Ryan, portraying the owner of a small, independent children’s bookstore, introduces a little girl to Betsy: “This is her best friend, Tacy, whose real name is Anastacia, and then in the next book, Betsy and Tacy become friends with Tib. . . . ” That recommendation is dead-on (the little girl demands all the books) — but it’s also meant to suggest that this is the kind of obscure children’s- book advice you would be unlikely to get from the less-informed employee at a soulless chain store like the one owned by Tom Hanks. In truth, there is an almost exclusive, conspiratorial glee to being a Betsy-Tacy fan. Lovelace’s books are a rarefied taste, known only to the cognoscenti. The Betsy-Tacy Society, founded in 1990, has in some ways played to this, with its trademark catchphrase, “I thought I was the only one!” This is a society of zealots, delighted to discover sisterhood and solidarity. There were hundreds of us readers, nearly all women, chasing down “important sites” in Minneapolis and Mankato on a hot weekend in July. We visited “Betsy’s House” and “Tacy’s House,” where Lovelace and her real best friend, Frances Kenney, known as Bick, lived as children, right across the street from each other. The Betsy-Tacy Society now owns both houses, which have been designated national literary landmarks, and Betsy’s house has been evocatively furnished and restored. We took turns crowding into the little one-bedroom apartment where Lovelace and her husband had lived, the model for the newlyweds’ first apartment in “Betsy’s Wedding.” (There’s a dove on the cake, do you hear me? A dove!) The current tenant looked on in good-natured amusement, but the owner of another Betsy-Tacy-related home a few blocks away had apparently asked in no uncertain terms to keep the groups off her property. I happened on Betsy and Tacy and Tib while growing up in New York City in the 1960s. I read through the first four, the “childhood” books, with their delicate drawings by Lois Lenski, the brilliant illustrator whose great subject was regional American childhood, and then passed them on to my own daughter when she was about 5. When Betsy graduates from elementary school, she also transitions from the round-faced, brown-braided child of Lenski’s folkloric illustrations to the slim and swoony, pompadoured adolescent depicted by Vera Neville, who illustrated the last six books, including the “high school” novels, one for each year. For many readers, these books are paramount, with their glamorous Gibson-girl-style illustrations, and their romantic subplots, steeped in the courtship customs of long ago. (“When you come out into the hall you’re given your program,” Betsy’s older sister, Julia, tells her, “and the boys rush up to ask for dances.”) At this year’s conference, Josephine drew up the trivia contest. The conference organizers had neglected to plan for one, and invited her to put together questions for the after-hours, cash-bar Perfectly Awful Girls activity (Tony, one of Betsy’s beaus, becomes disaffected from the high school crowd in “Betsy Was a Junior,” and starts frequenting saloons and “going around with a perfectly awful girl”). Before administering the fiendishly difficult contest, Josephine took the opportunity to recount the story of my wedding cake gaffe to all assembled. The real heroine of the 2012 convention, no question, was Jennifer Hart, an associate publisher at William Morrow, who received a standing ovation when she was first pointed out, and then again and most resoundingly when she spoke. It was she who, while at Harper Perennial, brought about new editions of the high school books, then completed the set with an omnibus edition of the four elementary school books, and two additional volumes of related “Deep Valley stories” in recent years. She did it, of course, because she too grew up with Betsy. “People come up to me, and they thank me,” she said. “I want to say it was completely selfish on my part because I love these books so much.” The Betsy-Tacy novels weren’t always obscure. When “Betsy’s Wedding” was first published in 1955, Lovelace had the good luck to get Esther Hautzig as a publicist. Hautzig, who herself wrote a classic children’s book, “The Endless Steppe,” based on her girlhood in Siberia (where her Lithuanian Jewish family was deported by the Soviets), fell in love with the America of Deep Valley and carried out an ambitious national publicity program, featuring a traveling life-size doll in a wedding dress. As with the “Little House” books, and more recently with Harry Potter, in the Betsy-Tacy series the narrative voice ages with the characters. “Betsy-Tacy,” like “Little House in the Big Woods,” is about a 5-year-old, told in simple sentences with a straightforward vocabulary — a book to be read by, or to, a relatively young child. “Betsy’s Wedding,” like “These Happy Golden Years,” is about a young woman (with a dove on her wedding cake), written in denser, more complex sentences, with a richer vocabulary than its predecessors. The narrative sensibility grows up with the characters, though children are invariably tempted to read ahead of their ages (think of all those 10-year-olds determined to follow Harry and Hermione into adolescence). Rereading the books as an adult allows you to experience a kind of meta-novel in which you see the characters change from the inside out. At the end of the conference, we bought our final souvenirs: cards and T-shirts and special pads of paper for making lists (“Betsy was always making lists,” the pad proclaims). When I went up to collect a set of old magazines I won at the silent auction, I discovered that someone who wished to remain anonymous had bid on an additional item as a gift for Josephine and me. A box was pressed into my arms: inside was a large Christmas tree topper in the shape of a dove. A Reader’s Guide to the Betsy-Tacy Books. The blog A Library Is the Hospital of the Mind is hosting a Maud Hart Lovelace reading challenge during the month of October. Pick out some Betsy-Tacy or Deep Valley books and skip on over to sign up. Participants will have a chance to win copies of HarperPerennial’s brand-new reissues of Emily of Deep Valley and (in a double volume, two books in one) Carney’s House Party / Winona’s Pony Cart . You know, the book I’ve been squeeing about for months, the one I had the thrill-me-to-my-very-bones honor of writing the foreword for? That one! Not sure where to start? Here’s a rundown of the Betsy-Tacy books and their Deep Valley companions. Book 1: Betsy-Tacy . Betsy Ray’s story—which is very, very similar to Maud’s real life story—kicks off on her fifth birthday, the day she gets to know her lifelong best friend, Tacy Kelly. From that day forth they are inseparable, which is why the neighbors always call them Betsy-Tacy . That’s the first book: very young girls having sweet and funny adventures in small-town Minnesota at the turn of the last century. It’s a lovely read- aloud for small girls, though I always give other mothers a heads-up about the death of Tacy’s baby sister, which happens quite early in the book and is very sensitively and quietly handled. In Book 2 , Betsy-Tacy and Tib , Betsy and Tacy roam farther from home, all the way to the grand chocolate-colored house a few blocks away —where they meet Tib, whose spritelike looks belie her blunt and practical nature. This is the year the girls learn to fly, explore the Mirror Palace, and concoct Everything Pudding. It’s the year Tacy has diphtheria and Tib and Betsy cut off their hair in solidarity. It’s a year full of exactly the right sort of mischief. In Book 3, Betsy and Tacy Go Over the Big Hill , the girls are the extremely sophisticated age of ten. Venturing to the other side of the Big Hill is a big deal—here, I’ve already written a big long post about it. Book 4: Betsy and Tacy Go Downtown . Now the girls are twelve—old enough to go all over town by themselves. Christmas shopping, Mr. Poppy’s Opera House, a friendly rivalry with spunky Winona Root, the newspaperman’s daughter. That’s the year the first horseless carriage comes to town, as well as a troupe of traveling actors. Betsy, Tacy, and Tib get involved with the play and there is a delicious bit of family drama as well. Those are the four “young” Betsy-Tacy books (collected now in a beautiful Treasury edition with a foreword by Judy Blume). Chronologically, Winona’s Pony Cart fits in that group; the central event is Winona Root’s 8th birthday. She gets herself into a bit of a scrape having to do with her party, and she’s not the only member of her family who makes a misstep, and what I love about this book—probably the most overlooked of Maud’s Deep Valley stories—is the earnestness with which Winona and her parents strive to recover from their individual errors of judgment. I was so happy to get to unpack this book more thoroughly in the foreword to the reissue. Winona is a girl to remember. Now come Betsy’s high-school-and-beyond books. Freshman year: Heaven to Betsy , which I wrote about here. New house, new school, new friends; Sunday night lunches, dances, skating parties. Joe Willard at Butternut Center. A crush on Tony; a Betsy struggling with moods and competing wishes. A Betsy who writes but doesn’t quite know what to do with her writing, doesn’t know how to reconcile the need to slip away and work with the desire to be in the thick of the merry- making crowd. Sophomore year: Betsy in Spite of Herself . It’s a makeover story! One of my favorite plot devices. Betsy is determined to reinvent herself into a creature more glamorous, more poised, more devastating to boys. Only trouble is, her own irrepressible self keeps bubbling up and taking over. This is the year of the fascinating Christmas visit to Tib’s German relatives in Milwaukee, the year of Phil Brandish and his red auto. Junior year: Betsy Was a Junior . Sorority fever. The joys of being part of a clique—and the crash that comes when you realize you’ve forgotten about the feelings of people outside your in-crowd. I think Betsy does some of her best growing up in this book, especially after that incident with her little sister Margaret and the stove. Senior year: Betsy and Joe . My favorite, because, well, Betsy and Joe . After high school, there’s Betsy and the Great World —she got off to a rough start in college and her folks wisely surmise that someone who wants to be a writer might benefit from travel. So off she goes to Europe by steamer. Things are rocky with Joe, and that undercurrent of tension gives her some perspective as she explores Munich, Venice, London, and more. A beautiful book. And oh that perfect telegram! And then, ever so satisfyingly, Betsy’s Wedding . I adore this book. Rings so true. The fun of finding and fitting out your first apartment, the comic misadventures of learning to run your own home. And (especially this) there’s Betsy’s challenge to make room for her writing, and to give Joe room for his. As a writer married to a writer, this book hits me where I live. Two more Deep Valley gems. Chronologically, Carney’s House Party fits in between Betsy and Joe and Betsy and the Great World . Carney is one of Betsy’s best high-school friends, a year ahead of Betsy, Tacy, and Tib in school. Her famous house party takes place the summer after her freshman year at Vassar. Her somewhat snobby roommate, Isobel, comes to Deep Valley for an extended visit with Carney’s family. Rounding out the party are Carney’s best friend, Bonnie Andrews, home from Paris, and in a surprise appearance, good old Betsy Ray. It’s hard for me to contain my remarks about this book to one little paragraph—though I managed it before when I wrote “ Carney’s House Party is one of my favorite of Maud Hart Lovelace’s books—I love how honestly Carney grapples with the complicated process of sorting out her college self from her hometown self.” Yeah, that’s it. I got to indulge in a meatier exploration of what makes this book tick in the foreword I wrote for the reissue. And then there’s Emily of Deep Valley . I’ve written about her at length. Short version: Emily’s a quieter sort than Betsy and Carney; she lives on the edge of the Slough with her elderly grandfather, the only family she has left. All her friends are heading off to college but Emily won’t leave her grandpa alone—a difficult decision, and a right one. Loneliness and depression set in, but she (famously) musters her wits to combat them. There is much to love about this book, but if I had to pick a favorite part, it would be the relationships that develop between Emily and the Little Syrian boys, and what comes of their connection. HarperPerennial’s lovely reissue of Emily of Deep Valley , with a moving foreword by author Mitali Perkins, plus historical material by Maud Hart Lovelace experts Julie Schrader and Amy Dolnick, as well as a bio of illustrator Vera Neville, will hit the shelves on October 12th. If you haven’t read this rather incredible book it would be a perfect choice for the MLH reading challenge. Of course you know I’m hoping you’ll read Carney and Winona too so we can gab about them!