Book review: Heaven to Betsy and Betsy in Spite of Herself by Maud Hart Lovelace

The twenty-eighth book I read in 2018 was really two books, an omnibus edition of the fifth and sixth books in Maud Hart Lovelace's Betsy series, Heaven to Betsy and Betsy in Spite of Herself.  As a child, I was never a fan of Lovelace; I recall trying to read Betsy-Tacy and quitting, unutterably bored.  Betsy never found a magic wishing coin or traveled through a wardrobe into another world or met a witch or even, like Laura Ingalls Wilder, took a covered wagon out west and dealt with Indians and blizzards and wildfires.  She was just a little girl going about everyday life in a small town, and I couldn't have cared less.

The next book in the Mother-Daughter Book Club series, however, is based on the Betsy series, particularly these last books dealing with her high school years and past, so I thought I'd give Betsy another try and see if she got any more interesting as a teenager. 

More interesting, yes, but likable, not particularly.  In what is now a trope (hello, Harry Potter), each of the next four books in the series deals with one school year in Betsy's life.  In the first book, Betsy is getting ready to start high school as a freshman.  The family moves away from her childhood home across the street from Tacy's house on the Big Hill and into a larger, more modern house nearer the center of town.  Between her older sister Julia and Betsy, they make the Ray house a frequent destination for school friends, both boys and girls.  In the second book, Betsy is a sophomore and travels to Milwaukee over Christmas to visit Tib, who moved away since the childhood books.

There's not a great deal more action than in the books chronicling Betsy's childhood years; instead, the narrative focuses on Betsy's ambitions for popularity.  Tacy is firmly sidelined in favor of more typical high school girl friends, not only by Betsy, but also by the author: although Betsy seems to "learn her lesson" a time or two over the course of the stories and spends time with Tacy, Lovelace glosses over that time off-screen, clearly preferring to depict the popular girls.  While morally questionable, it is this very choice that makes the books interesting today, in their portrayal of a very different style of adolescence: shirtwaists, pompadours over rats, putting on powder with a chamois skin (acceptable for decent girls) and putting on rouge with a rabbit's foot (the behavior of actresses and loose women), dance cards, a school teacher openly courting a senior girl, etc. 

While I have decried Sweet-Valleyism in the Mother-Daughter Book Club, these books serve as prototypes.  Each can't resist an early description of Betsy's slim waist and peaches-and-cream complexion, in prose little different than each installment of Sweet Valley High's description of the physical perfection of the Wakefield Twins, right down to Jessica/Betsy twirling around in front of a mirror and complaining about her physical flaws.

Betsy is decidedly boy-crazy, not in the sense of falling for any particular boy but more longing for the power which she discerns in her older sister Julia of being able to lead one around on a string and then drop him for a new model when she gets bored.  Her obsession with popularity leads to her failure, in each book, to achieve the academic goals she has set for herself.  One presumes that this will culminate, in her senior year, with academic triumph.