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List Price: $23.80
Our Price: $4.95
You Save: 79%
Product Details:
Type: Paperback
Item#: c5527
ISBN#: 0064400964
- Illustrations by Lois Lenski * Ages 7-10
- New in this edition: New Forwards by Johanna Hurwitz and others who grew up with these books * Maud Lovelace’s own story about how these charming books came about — plus photos of the actual people and places who were written into in the stories!
- 4 quality paperbacks
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Handsome new 60th Anniversary Edition!
What a little girl’s books should be . . .
Betsy-Tacy/Betsy-Tacy and Tib/Betsy and Tacy Go Over the Big Hill/Betsy and Tacy Go Downtown
by Maude Hart Lovelace
. . . full of old-fashioned fun and friendship and virtue. No wonder that for 60 years young girls have been reading and rereading these four delightful Betsy-Tacy stories. Now your daughters can do the same. But don’t forget yourself. Did you miss these way back when? Is it time to revive some old memories? Reading these stories aloud to your girls could be the perfect way. In fact, that’s how the series got started.
(continued from above)
When her daughter Merian was young, author Maud Hart Lovelace entertained her with bedtime stories based on Maud’s own childhood in a small town in Minnesota. Each night Merian would plead for “just one more story.” These stories eventually became the beloved Betsy-Tacy books.
Betsy met Tacy when they were both five. Not long after, another little girl named Tib moved nearby. The three became good friends. With these four books we follow the girls growing up, from ages 5 to 12, just after the turn of the century. Besty, Tacy, Tib, their families and friends — how real they are! We’ll listen in on a few lines from volume 3:
Betsy, Tacy, and Tib were nine years old, and they were very anxious to be ten.
“You have two numbers in your age when you are ten. It’s the beginning of growing up,” Betsy would say.
Then the three of them felt solemn and important and pleased. They could hardly wait for their birthdays.
It was strange that Betsy and Tacy and Tib were in such a hurry to grow up, for they had sop much fun being children. Betsy and Tacy lived on Hill Street which ran straight up into a green hill and stopped. The small yellow cottage where Betsy Ray lived was the last house on that side of the street, and the rambling white house opposite where Tacy Kelly lived was the last house on that side. They had the whole hill for a playground.
Tib didn’t live on Hill Street. . . . But Tib lived near enough to come to play every day.
“They certainly have fun, those three,” Betsy’s mother used to say to Betsy’s father.
They did, too.
They were not always as good as they might have been — they cooked up awful messes and once daubed themselves with mud. Don’t miss this bit of naughty hijinks from volume 2:
“Well I’m hungry,” said Tacy. “I wonder where we’re going to get something to eat.” And she looked at Betsy hard. . . .
“We may have to beg,” she said.
“What’s that?” asked Tib.
“Muss up our hair and dirty our dresses and pretend we need something to eat.”
“We do need something to eat,” said Tacy. “No pretend about it.”
“My mother wouldn’t like me to muss up my dress,” said Tib. She meant that her mother wouldn’t like her to muss up her dress. She didn’t mean she wouldn’t do it.
“She’d rather have you muss up your dress than starve,” said Betsy. “We might starve to death in this ravine.”
“Might we?” asked Tib.
“I feel sort of starved already,” said Betsy.
“So do I,” said Tacy. “I feel weak.”
They listened to the spring bubbling out of the ground.
“If we all got mussed up,” said Betsy, “maybe our mothers would see that it couldn’t be helped.” So they began to muss each other up.
It was fun missing each other up. It was such fun that they almost forgot they were hungry. They loosened Betsy’s braids and tangled Tacy’s ringlets and ruffled Tib’s fluffy hair until she looked like a dandelion gone to seed. Then they put mud on one another. Mud on cheeks and noses, and mud on arms and legs. There was plenty of mud beside the brook and they put on plenty. They put it on their dresses and smooched it down with their hands. . . .
They had reached the Ekstroms’ kitchen garden. . . . Mrs. Ekstrom came to the door. . . . She looked at Betsy and Tacy and Tib and said, “Heavens and earth!” . . .
“We’re hungry,” said Tib.
“Hungry!” said Mrs. Ekstrom. “You’re lots besides hungry. What happened to you anyway?”
“We got hungry,” said Tib.
Betsy and Tacy didn’t say a word, but they tried to act as hungry as they could. Betsy put her hands over her stomach and leaned forward and groaned. Tacy . . . opened and shut her mouth and made queer hungry noises.
Mrs. Ekstrom’s face broke into a smile.
She opened the kitchen door to let them come in, and gave them a paper to stand on.
They had come to a good house to be hungry in, Betsy saw at once. Mrs. Ekstrom was baking cookies.
From going to school together and riding in the milkman’s wagon to making a playhouse from a piano box, they always managed to have a good time.
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