Betsy-Tacy

Betsy-Tacy Maud Hart-Lovelace Date: 04 April, 2000   —   $5.99   —   Book product page Rating:

Fiction, Children's 7-10

I am endlessly fascinated by children's books that were written in the first few decades of the twentieth century. To begin with, they work on a totally different set of assumptions. Betsy and her new friend Tacy run around and play with little or no supervision on their little street in their little town. That's pretty standard for older books. The kicker is that they are five-year-olds, and modern parents would be scared to let them out of their sight, let alone allow them to wander all over town, to climb the hill, and to basically do those run-around-and-play things that kids today are so sorely lacking.

There's also an incidental death, that of Tacy's young baby sister, and it's taken for granted that such things happen and that, perhaps, one five-year-old has to figure out how to best comfort another five-year-old. Such things seem impossibly distant these days. Ah, well.