Milwaukee is a magical, mysterious place, far away from Deep Valley. They deal with life changes, a death in the family and a birth in the family, and they start school and explore their neighbourhood, gradually expanding their horizons (literally). Sometimes they have adventures and these include fantastic moments wherein girls fly and horses talk (ever-so briefly, but they do), but mostly the girls inhabit the everyday. When they play paper dolls (which are cut from fashion magazines and stored between the pages of those magazines), the “five-year-olds were the most important members of the large doll families” (49).

Sometimes they sit on a bench at the end of the street, sometimes they play in their piano box, which is their “headquarters, their playhouse, the center of all their games” (21). Tacy lives in the rambling white house opposite Betsy’s, the last house on that side of Hill Street she has red ringlets, freckles, and thin legs, and her mother has ten children besides her.

I hoped to surprise myself and read more than the first two volumes, but October brings out the under-achiever in me, so I just met my challenge goal and read no further.īetsy Tacy is primarily about those two little girls: Betsy Ray and Tacy Kelly.īetsy lives in the small yellow cottage, last on Hill Street she is middle-sized with plump legs and short short brown braids which stuck out behind her ears, and she is almost always smiling. I kept re-reading the third and fourth volumes of the series and never filled in the gaps, so Sarah’s Second Maud Hart Lovelace Reading Challenge was the impetus to get reacquainted. I first met Betsy, Tacy and Tib when I was nine or ten, but I didn’t know them as well as I might have.

Betsy tacy novel