Book review: Betsy and the Great World and Betsy's Wedding by Maud Hart Lovelace

The thirty-fourth book I read in 2018 was another two-in-one: Betsy and the Great World and Betsy's Wedding by Maud Hart Lovelace.  These are the ninth and tenth, and the final, books in the Betsy series.

Unlike the Harry-at-Hogwarts pacing of the previous four books, each of which covered a school year, Great World opens two and a half years after Betsy's high school graduation.  What we learn of the intervening time in quick summary does not cover her with glory: Just like in high school, she goofed off in college, majoring in the social scene, and not only dropped out but started dating someone else after Joe transferred to Harvard and broke up with him again, after the interminable will-they-or-won't-they of their high school career.

Because Betsy must always land on her feet, however, her father has arranged for her to spend a year traveling in Europe.  This book is much less a story and more a travelogue, based as it is on Lovelace's letters home from a similar trip of her own.  As it stands, some of the text is cringeworthy, like Betsy's distaste for the Muslim neighborhoods she visits and her horrified sympathy for little girls wearing veils. 

World War I breaks out before Betsy's grand tour is over, however, and it becomes the only truly successful part of the book, casting a bittersweet pall over the futures of all the European friends Betsy has made and (natch) prompting Betsy to make apologetic overtures to Joe.  Unfortunately, the swoonworthy item in the Personals section of the London Times that brings her home -- "Betsy. The Great War is on but I hope ours is over. Please come home. Joe." -- is an anachronism.  World War I didn't begin to be called the Great War until October 1917 so Joe was quite prescient to have termed it such in August 1914.

Wedding leaves the troubles in Europe behind for most of its length, being interested rather in Betsy and Joe's brief engagement, wedding, and setting up housekeeping.  Unfortunately, it also leaves unaddressed many dangling plot threads from the previous books.  The fates of Betsy's European acquaintances?  Silence.  There's no indication that Betsy even attempted to correspond with the friends she made in Great World.  More annoying is Carney suddenly turning up married to a fellow named Sam in Minneapolis, after going off to Vassar with a place in her heart still reserved for Larry Humphreys.  Whatever happened with that?

One part of Wedding that definitely works is when Joe's Aunt Ruth asks to come and live with the newlyweds.  Having been widowed and sold the store she and her husband ran, she is lonely and wants a place to stay for a while.  Joe, having been taken in by her as a child, cannot refuse, but Betsy's inner rebellion at the idea of sharing her love-nest with an outsider is entirely believable and well-portrayed. Her grudge poisons the happiness of the young marriage until she is able to let go of her resentment, and her submission is well-rewarded in many ways.  Later, when Aunt Ruth decides to move to California to be near other relations, it's a real wrench, both to Betsy and to the reader, for her to leave. 

While the Betsy books are based on Maud Hart Lovelace's real life, one strand of fiction running through them is Joe.  In actuality, Maud didn't meet the man she would marry until 1917.  She wanted to depict his story too in the series, but I can't help but feel that, in writing Joe in Betsy's life so early rather than giving his childhood a separate book as Laura Ingalls Wilder did with Farmer Boy, she did some violence to their story.  Betsy and Joe are delightful in Wedding, but the will-they-won't-they through the previous five books turn them into a proto-Ross-and-Rachel.  It's hard to feel that they will be good for each other when she gives them such an extended backstory of misunderstanding, callousness, and over-sensitivity.

An aside: These two-fer editions boast introductions by female authors and back matter delineating the real-life basis for the story.  The back matter is excellent, but I have a bone to pick with the introductions.  Heaven to Betsy and Betsy in Spite of Herself had an introduction by Laura Lippman, a name that was vaguely familiar to me though I have no idea what she has written; Betsy Was a Junior and Betsy and Joe was introduced by Meg Cabot who spent her pages advertising for her Princess Diary series and admitting that while it was sweet for Betsy to say that she didn't want any boy but the right one to kiss her, logically there was no way for Betsy to know who the right boy is unless she went around snogging all of them on offer (and you can see where that slippery slope is headed).

Betsy and the Great World and Betsy and Joe, however, has an introduction by Anna Quindlen, which I must call out for intellectual dishonesty.  Quindlen's thesis is that Betsy is a feminist series, ahead of its time, and that without Lovelace's series, she would never have known that being an author was an option for women.  In the first place, she herself lists Jane Austen as one of her favorite authors, a woman who was a successful author long before Lovelace's time.  Beyond Austen are the Bronte sisters and Agatha Christie and Josephine Tey and Emily Dickinson and Harriet Beecher Stowe and Laura Ingalls Wilder and dozens of other very well-known female writers. 

Her complaint, however, seems to be that these other authors didn't write books about fictional girls who wanted to be writers.  Well, except for Louisa May Alcott and L. M. Montgomery, whom Quindlen discounts because Jo was "punished" for her ambition by not marrying Laurie and Anne "had" to support herself and thus didn't make a choice to pursue a writing career but was forced into in be necessity.  This doesn't really scan with my impression of the Anne series, and I wonder if Quindlen realizes that Alcott wanted Jo to end Little Women a single woman with a successful career and was forced by her publisher to marry her off -- or the implied insult to Alcott that her failure to marry is something to be mourned.

Not to mention that Wedding would be denounced as retrograde rather than feminist today, with Betsy's insisting that she must learn to cook and keep house for Joe instead of accepting the public relations job she is offered in the course of the book.

Book review: Home for the Holidays by Heather Vogel Frederick

The thirty-third book I read in 2018 was the fifth book in Heather Vogel Frederick's Mother-Daughter Book Club series, Home for the Holidays.  This time around, the girls tackle the Betsy-Tacy series, though they talk their moms down from the entire ten-book series to only Betsy's high school years: Heaven to Betsy, Betsy in Spite of Herself, Betsy Was a Junior, and Betsy and Joe. 

This installment in the series is notable in that it marks the first time Becca, Chadwickius frenemus, gets to narrate point-of-view chapters.  It's also different in that it encompasses only half a school year -- and most of that is in a quick flashback; the actual narrative covers only Thanksgiving through New Year's, that is, the "holidays" of the title. 

Speaking of the title, no one actually is "home" over the school holidays.  The Chadwicks and the Wongs have booked a cruise together, a plan that gets fraught with complications when Becca's dad loses his job; Jess and Emma spend Christmas with Jess's aunt and uncle in New Hampshire; and Cassidy travels to California to visit her older sister Courtney and explore the possibility of her family moving back to LA for good.

While the club members are split up, their moms have arranged a Secret Santa gift exchange, only thanks to Jess's mischievous little brothers, all the gifts are switched, leading to bad feelings all around.

The contrivances and misunderstandings around the Secret Santa gifts are a little much, as both Jess and Emma and Megan and Becca spend the holidays getting mad at one another over nothing.  Jess and Emma in particular grate, as they've been BFFs for so long that their being torn apart by petty lies spread by strangers rather than actually talking to one another is fairly unbelievable.  More annoying is Frederick's decision to make the dreamy cruise ship captain's son speak French, when she's not actually fluent in the language.  Philippe makes his way through a crowd with Becca by saying "Let's excuse ourselves," rather than "Excuse us," as Frederick no doubt intended. 

Book review: The Great Quake by Henry Fountain

The thirty-second book I read in 2018 was The Great Quake: How the Biggest Earthquake in North America Changed Our Understanding of the Planet by Henry Fountain.  Like The Great Influenza, this book tells a story that ought to be compelling but in the end ... isn't.

Fountain does try.  The book opens with geologists flying in to Anchorage two days after the disaster to examine the damage and learn what they can from the Good Friday 1964 quake.  From there, Fountain jumps back in time to describe the towns and residents that were to be irrevocably changed in the quake.  He alternates these chapters with background about his main character, a geologist named George Plafker who was his main source of information.  It's not until about halfway through the book that the quake hits; the remainder of the pages deals with the casualties and survivors and the lessons scientists drew from the quake.

Unfortunately, few of the stories of those who lived or died are detailed enough to draw the reader into their tragedies.  In large part, undoubtedly, this is due to the sheer passage of time between the event and the writing of the book; not enough of the bereaved could be contacted to tell their own or their lost loved ones' stories.  Also, due to the sheer destruction, many of those who lived through the quake left the immediate area afterward and started over elsewhere, making them harder to track down.  In addition, there is a language and cultural barrier with the Native Americans whose villages were some of the hardest hit which might have dissuaded them from sharing their experiences.

Whatever the reason, the dead are hard to empathize with.  Due to the small number of families of one of the villages destroyed by the quake, many of them had similar or identical names, which makes it hard to keep track of who survives and who is lost.  Also, Fountain is limited by who he has been able to interview all these years later.  One of the most haunted deaths is that of a woman in Anchorage whose car is crushed by a stone facade which fell off of a department store; Fountain relates the story of a woman who witnessed this death, but the identity of the woman who died, what she was doing before the quake, and who mourned her after her passing remain untold. 

As indicated by the long subtitle, a major focus of this book is on the confirmation of the theory of plate tectonics which resulted from the study of the Good Friday quake.  It's interesting that plate tectonics was vehemently rejected by reputable scientists after Alfred Wegener proposed it, in large part merely because he was a meteorologist and geologists bristled at the concept of anyone but themselves coming up with such a breakthrough.  Like the initial vitriol directed at Hoyle's Big Bang theory, it puts the lie to the fiction that science, at least as personified by scientists, is objective and disinterested.