I only discovered Maud Hart Lovelace after I started blogging. Her Minnesota-set Betsy-Tacy series of children’s books have insipid titles that would have earned my contempt if anyone had tried to press them on me when I was young (Betsy and Tacy Go Over the Big Hill, Heaven to Betsy, and Betsy Was a Junior) but she had so many fans in the book blogging world that I had to try her for myself. I started with a non-Betsy-Tacy book (Emily of Deep Valley) and thought it was fine. At the time, I remarked that I didn’t think, based on the brief glimpse of Betsy provided in Emily of Deep Valley, that I could face any of the books focused on her. But then I found a copy of Betsy and the Great World for sale at the library for 50 cents and decided to take a chance.
After two years of university, Betsy Ray has had enough. She convinces her parents that, as an aspiring writer, she is not getting a lot of value from her math and science classes. They agree and instead offer up an education of a different sort: a year abroad, travelling in Europe. (Note: this was not the offer my parents made to me whenever I complained about my university classes. Tragically.) Unsurprisingly, she is ecstatic and, in possession of a flashy wardrobe and lots of enthusiasm, she sets off for Europe. It is January 1914, she is twenty-one years old, and the world seems full of possibilities.
The book follows Betsy through her shipboard adventures, her travels on the continent (Germany, Italy, Switzerland, France), and her arrival in England – just in time for war to be declared. Through it all, she does her best to make new friends and keep up her writing even as she struggles with homesickness and a longing for Joe, the boyfriend she had parted from before leaving and is now fearful of having lost forever.
The highlights of the book for me were the descriptions of the places Betsy visits. Betsy herself was wildly uninteresting but I loved hearing about her walks through Munich, her wanderings around Venice, and her instant love affair with London. The only part of Betsy’s journey I did not enjoy was her brief stay in Oberammergau, where the piety of the citizens, many of them actors in the village’s famous Passion Play, was taken far too seriously by the young American (and her creator).
Though I developed absolutely no interest in or attachment to Betsy over the course of the novel, I was impressed by Lovelace’s descriptions of Betsy’s mood changes and the frequent waves of homesickness that plagued her. Lovelace has a disarmingly honest was of talking about unpleasant or negative emotions (which were also a feature of Emily of Deep Valley).
But there were things that outweighed the honesty and the enchanting travel details: so much of the story is focused on Betsy’s new friendships (both platonic and romantic) and the episodic and repetitive nature of these relationships felt lazy. Yes, Betsy seems to be a young woman who makes friends (and conquests) easily but I longed for some more substantial development. Her need to surround herself with a group of people, to form a clique (or, in her words, a Crowd) in each new place, saddened me. By the end of the book, Betsy has seen many places and had many wonderful experiences but it is not clear how much she has actually learned, particularly about herself.
There is one feature I cannot decide if I should classify as a positive or a negative: Betsy’s garish wardrobe. Maud Hart Lovelace describes her heroine’s costumes in loving detail and the vast majority of them are awful – laughably so. Betsy has a particular fondness for a red-green hat, worn with a pale green dress and a scarlet jacket. There is also a matronly-sounding maroon silk evening dress. And she wonders how people know she is an American even before she speaks! The illustrations don’t help either, making her look either ten years behind the fashions or forty years ahead of them.
Clearly, this was not an instant favourite with me, though there is something intriguing about Lovelace’s writing, though it is very uneven. I am even a little bit tempted to read the final Betsy-Tacy book, Betsy’s Wedding. But while I can somewhat stomach grown-up Betsy, the idea of reading about her childhood escapades sends a shiver up my spine. No. Just…no. I cannot face that.
The Magic Summer by Noel Streatfeild actually made me understand why people love Streatfeild so much. I had never read any of her children’s books before, just 
You want to know who doesn’t feel like a real child? Tom from Tom’s Midnight Garden by Philippa Pearce. I know people adore this book and will hate to hear any criticism, however minor, but they will have to forgive me. He is flat but the book is not. It is a magical story, about a boy who, while staying with his aunt and uncle, discovers that when the clock strikes thirteen each night in the lobby of their apartment building he is able to slip into the past. Rather than the dreary, rundown apartment building of modern times (“modern” here being the 1950s, as the book came out in 1958) he finds himself back in the days when the building was a family home, when it was surrounded by a large garden instead of other buildings, and when a young girl, Hatty, lived there. Most people cannot see Tom when he appears in the past but Hatty can and they become playmates. Night after night, Tom visits her but with each visit she grows a little older, years passing in what for him is a single day. Thought the ending was clear from the very beginning of the book, it still made me tear up a little. I am so glad I finally read this.
But the book I am most glad to have read, the one that entertained me the most, was The Secret World of Og by Pierre Berton. Until recently, I had no idea that Berton, a Canadian historian, had written a children’s book. Apparently, my father could have told me as much: this was one of his childhood favourites, having been published in 1961 when he was six years old.
Before the Flood by A.A. Milne is a one-act play but not, I think, the kind of play most churches would pick to perform at any of their events, despite the biblical origins of the story. Milne imagines the domestic affairs in Noah’s home in the months between him receiving his divine instructions to build the ark and the day when the rains begin. The question hanging over them all – Noah’s wife, his three sons and their respective wives – is whether the floods will actually come and be quite as extreme as Noah has been ‘told’. It can be quite amusing at times, as the family debates the ark-related logistics that Noah’s divine instructions do not account for: how can they bring all those animals on board and prevent the predators from eating their natural prey? If the animals aren’t going to eat one another, what are they going to eat? Does the family need to bring extra animals on board for catering purposes? On the whole though, it is not the best of Milne’s work and easily my least favourite of his plays. I only laughed once, when, after Noah tells his family that they will be the only ones to survive the coming flood, one of the sons turns to his wife and says “Aren’t you glad now that you married into this family?” (or words to that effect). The book ends when the rain starts to fall, leaving the question of whether Noah is a prophet or a madman unanswered.
Many Waters by Madeleine L’Engle, on the other, leaves no doubt as to the veracity of Noah’s claims. In fact, Noah is but a minor character and he and his ark are ignored for a large portion of the book. The focus in this children’s book from 1986 is on the interaction between the earthly and divine in this imagined pre-flood world where angels walk among men. As soon as I started reading, I remembered why I found this book so weirdly fascinating when I was young. Not good, necessarily, but fascinating. It is the fourth book in the “Time Quartet”, the series that begins with A Wrinkle in Time, L’Engle’s most famous book, but it was the only one I ever felt compelled to reread. The mechanics of L’Engle’s idea of time/space travel never appealed to me but seraphim and nephilim, for some reason, did.
