The Besty-Tacy Treasure - Review

My Review:

Since I began reading books in my early childhood, I kept the love of reading alive well into my later adult ones and some of the classics are beginning to resurface such as the Betsy-Tacy series, in this collection that I had the opportunity to review. The best part this has been being able to share this simple but timeless stories with my youngest daughter who is enjoying them as much as I am.

Since the books begin when the girls are 5 and continue until they are 12, the stories provide a rare opportunity to open up dialogue with my own daughter. The stories share what it's like for girls to grow from childhood to adolescence even though this books were written in a different time period, the situations are still real life for any girl to have to endure and lessons are learned along the way.

I received this book collection to review compliments of TLC Book Tours for my honest review and have to stamp this a perfect 5 out of 5 stars! Here's even more great information about the book, the author and where to purchase a copy below:

About The Betsy-Tacy Treasury

• Paperback: 736 pages
• Publisher: Harper Perennial Modern Classics (November 8, 2011)

There are lots of children on Hill Street, but no little girls Betsy’s age. So when a new family moves into the house across the street, Betsy hopes they will have a little girl she can play with. Sure enough, the moment Betsy meets Tacy, one of the most heartfelt friendships in all of children’s literature begins.

The Betsy-Tacy Treasury brings together the first four books in Maud Hart Lovelace’s classic series: Betsy-Tacy; Betsy, Tacy and Tib; Betsy and Tacy Go Over the Big Hill; and Betsy and Tacy Go Downtown. Tracing the girls’ lives from early childhood to the brink of adolescence, Lovelace illuminates their innocent, mischievous fun and their eye-opening adventures exploring the world around them—from the stories Betsy spins from their neighborhood bench and the sand stores they run in their backyards, to their first experiences at the library, the thrill of the theater, and the sight of their first automobile.

The Treasury includes forewords by Judy Blume, Ann M. Martin, and Johanna Hurwitz.

About Maud Hart Lovelace

Maud Hart Lovelace was born on April 25, 1892, in Mankato, Minnesota. Like Betsy, Maud followed her mother around the house at age five asking such questions 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, for ten dollars, to the Los Angeles Times.

The Hart family left Mankato shortly after Maud’s high school graduation in 1910. They settled in Minneapolis, where Maud attended the University of Minnesota. In 1914, she sailed for Europe, and spent the months leading up to the outbreak of World War I in England. In 1917, she married Delos W. Lovelace, a newspaper reporter who later became a popular writer of short stories, and in 1926 her first novel was published. Five more historical novels followed. Maud wrote two of them in collaboration with her husband.

The Lovelaces’ daughter Merian was born in 1931. Maud would tell her daughter bedtime stories about her childhood in Minnesota and it was these stories that gave the author 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 Betsy-Tacy books were based closely upon Maud’s own life. Almost all of Betsy’s experiences were also Maud’s. “Of course, I could make it all up, but in these Betsy-Tacy stories, I love to work from real incidents,” Maud wrote.

Maud Hart Lovelace died on March 11, 1980. But her legacy lives on in the beloved series she created and in her legion of fans, many of whom are members of the Betsy-Tacy Society, a national organization based in Mankato.

Find out about the Betsy-Tacy convention in 2012 and the Betsy-Tacy Society.

To read even more reviews on this collection, click on the TLC Book Tour.