‘I’m glad Tib stood up for the little Syrian girl. Muller, Tib’s mother, who affirms their decision not to be “innocent” bystanders: Tib lives in a grander house her father is a professional while Betsy and Tacy’s fathers are salesmen. They rescue their new friends, and then report the incident to their parents. They do feel fear, but they are secure enough to know that they are right and the boys are wrong. Betsy, Tacy, and Tib, along with their older sisters, intervene. Some aggressive boys taunt Naifi, mimicking her accent, pulling her hair, and yanking off her headscarf. One day in the schoolyard the warm and friendly interactions that are typical of the girls and their friends suddenly become a horrible display of xenophobic childhood cruelty. Although her clothing is different, they find this admirable, and they are equally fascinated that she writes “backwards” in “Syrian.” Betsy, Tacy, and Tib meet a little girl named Naifi. One part of their small town, Little Syria, is populated by immigrants in homes built by a disappointed eastern developer who discovered that this was the only market for his buildings. But within the idyllic community of Deep Valley, not everyone is so enlightened. When they cannot afford a desk for her, her mother constructs one out of an old theatrical trunk. Both her parents encourage her, expressing pride in her stories and poems. Betsy, the character modeled on Lovelace herself, longs to be a writer. Perhaps the sensitivity and flexible attitudes of their parents, the positive and accepting values of their homes, make these three girls defy stereotypical ideas about girls and women. The three of them didn’t quarrel, any more than the two of them had.” But the three girls will not be a part of that destructive view of female friendship: “But although so many people expected it, no trouble began with Betsy, Tacy, and Tib. The friendship of the three girls, along with their family relationships, does suffer some minor detours on the road to near perfection, but that reassuring illusion alone does not characterize the series.įirst, the very fact that these three girls constantly love and support one another, in spite of the fact that when they first all become friends, skeptics claim that three girls cannot be fair to one another without turning against one another. What is the source of the devotion that followers of Betsy, Tacy, and Tib, three girls growing up in a small town in Minnesota at the turn of the twentieth century, maintain into adulthood? The series of ten novels, which take Betsy and her close friends from the age of five to young adulthood, seems to fill a nostalgic need to re-imagine childhood as a wonderful era almost free of conflict or suffering. Book Referenced: The Betsy-Tacy Treasury – Maud Hart Lovelace and Lois Lenksi, William Morrow Paperbacks, 2011 (reprint of first four books in the series, 1940-1943)

Betsy tacy and tib