Loving Lincoln

The sweet girl and I have been wending our way through a study of the Civil War. I'm thankful that we had a chance to attend a Civil War day back in July at the historic site near us. That gave her a great preliminary "taste" of the period, especially experiencing the costumes, tents, soldier's kits, period music, etc.

But as usual, it's been books that have carried us through. We've been particularly taken with books about Abraham Lincoln. Even though we've technically finished the unit (we've moved forward into other areas in Story of the World) we keep reading more. And I find myself wanting to read a good adult biography of Lincoln now too. Any suggestions welcome!

Loving to read about Lincoln reminds me, of course, of one of my favorite fictional characters, Emily Webster. Emily of Deep Valley is set in 1912. Emily too loves to read about Lincoln, especially with her grandfather who fought in the Civil War. Maud Hart Lovelace never seems to tire of telling the tale of the brave Minnesota regiment at Gettysburg. Emily and her grandfather end up reading, at the recommendation of her former high school teacher Miss Fowler, "Herndon's Lincoln." If you google that, you'll discover it's an actual biography of Lincoln written in 1888. It's still available today and still garners glowing reviews from most readers. It's also, however, huge. So I've never been sure if it's where I want to start -- although I often find big ol' biographical tomes to be just the right kind of reading for winter. Hmm...a sentiment I probably originally learned from Emily Webster, but have discovered the truth of myself over the years. (Dorothy Kearns Goodwin kept me going one winter with her biography of Roosevelt.)

My list of favorite children's books about Lincoln continues to grow. This week I've added Lincoln Tells a Joke to that list -- Kathleen Krull, Paul Brewer, and illustrator Stacy Innerst's marvelous picture book biography that focuses on Lincoln's humor and down-to-earth manner. It's such a delightful fact that such a deeply profound man, living through such a sobering and heavy time, managed to stay afloat because of laughter.

My very favorite Lincoln book for children may well be Lincoln and His Boys by Rosemary Wells. I first read it when it came out in 2009 (and reviewed it here) but this week the sweet girl and I read it together. I cannot get through the final chapter without tears, whether reading silently or aloud. It manages to capture that lighthearted side of Lincoln while also perfectly capturing the heavy emotional weight he carried due to both personal and national tragedies. P.J. Lynch's illustrations in this book are just stunning.

This will likely be our year to do Little Women as a family read-aloud. The book of my childhood. I get shivers of anticipation just thinking about reading it with my husband and daughter. So our Civil War theme will stretch later into the fall and winter. We will probably not start it until around our Thanksgiving trip (if we're able to make that trip this year) as we'll have lots of time in the car that no longer has a functioning CD player. In other words, Mom gets to be the audio book! But I'm glad of it in this case. I love reading aloud, and Jo March's voice...well, it's practically part of my own.

If Betsy and Tacy Had Blogs

I was up very late again last night, reading through and making responses to papers and posts in my online class. Nearing the end of the semester, the only way to make progress up the mountain is to take a deep breath and just climb.

One of the things getting me through these good but exhausting late night teaching treks is beautiful Christmas music. In addition to playing through some of my old favorites, I've been finding some Christmas gems on youtube. When you're bleary eyed at 1:30 am from reading patristic theology (a fine thing to do during Advent, by the way) it can put tremendous vigor into your soul to spend time listening to Andrea Bocelli sing "Adestes Fideles".

Somewhere in the midst of recent late-night multiple play-throughs, the thought came to me suddenly: Julia Ray would love Andrea Bocelli.

Julia Ray, of course, is the older sister of Betsy Ray, the main character in Maud Hart Lovelace's beloved Betsy-Tacy series, set in the early 1900s. Julia's heart belongs to opera, but she also enjoys popular music, and she is quite a fan girl of Caruso. It dawned on me that if the Betsy-Tacy characters lived in the internet age, Julia would no doubt be the administrator of the Andrea Bocelli fan page on Facebook.

(Side note: does anyone else ever do this: see or hear something and think "oh, so- and-so would just love this!" when "so-and-so" happens to be a fictional character? It helps, of course, when you've grown up with fictional characters and loved them for so long that they feel like friends.)

Picturing Julia Ray on FB gave me the late-night giggles. Suddenly I found myself thinking about other Deep Valley characters, and what they might be doing if they had access to the internet.

Grown-up Betsy, of course, would have a very writerly blog. I think she'd name it "Willards' Emporium" after the now-defunct store. I picture its banner as a photo of rosy apple blossoms. She'd have an oft-changing quote (with things like "to thine own self be true") and a sidebar picture of a long-legged crane. Joe would pop in from time to time to guest post, and she'd also keep a neatly organized side-bar with clips of his online journalistic endeavors. Whenever she or Joe got published, she'd post about it with a picture of the naughty chair from the Violent Study Club. And of course, she'd be the one keeping the Study Club's calendar in Yahoo Groups.

Tacy would keep a blog too. She'd include cute photos of her homeschooled kids. Yes, I've pegged Tacy for a homeschooler. I think she'd be an unschooler with a bent toward classical education -- something in gentle Miss Clark's freshman ancient history class must have stuck somehow! She'd share recipes for her best company dinner too -- roast chicken, giblet gravy good enough for a millionaire, and chocolate meringue pie. She might even tell a few good-natured Irish jokes.

I can't quite picture Tib keeping a blog, but I do think she'd have all the latest technological gadgets, including a really smart phone. She'd no doubt snap pictures of her latest brilliant dressmaking creations or fabulous dinners and send them electronically to Betsy and Tacy, sure they'd want to post her pictures on their blogs. And she'd be right. Naturally. (She'd also make sure that any new friends got a look at the Betsy-Tacy cat duet she put up on youtube.)

Carney might have a blog too, though I've been wavering about what kind. Somehow I can picture her creating a very cool looking sewing blog and running a brisk, efficient business of handmade items on etsy. She's gotta help pay for the kids' music lessons after all. She's also busy with vice presidential duties on her Vassar alumnae FB page (she generously let Isabelle be president).

You can find out a lot from the online CV of Emily Webster-Wakeman, MSW, PhD. It's posted at her university website. You'll note she's on the board for several refugee and immigrant advocacy groups and is in demand as a public speaker. Emily also enjoys a wide circle of friends on FB, where she proudly sports flair and fan pages for Abraham Lincoln, Teddy Roosevelt and the Bull Moosers, Jane Addams, and Robert Browning. Her husband Jed is busy on FB too, especially with his college wrestling buddies and his fellow civil war re-enactors.

Okay, okay...it's been fun...but the mountain of end of semester work awaits! I'll stop for now. Of course, if you're a Deep Valley fan, feel free to chime in with your own ideas about Betsy-Tacy in the internet age!

The Continuing Adventures of Betsy, Tacy and Tib

Although I thought the sweet girl was relating most to Tib in our recent read-aloud of Maud Hart Lovelace's first two Betsy-Tacy books, she has recently declared herself Betsy. She's named two of her dolls Tacy and Tib, and this afternoon they've been very busy. In fact, everywhere I turn, that trio is up to something!

Today's adventures....Betsy, Tacy and Tib have played with Lego's, given each other fun hairstyles, and gone to dancing class. That would be the sweet girl's darkened room, with music playing and a big flashlight to use as a spotlight.

Although I cracked up over the idea of Betsy, Tacy and Tib (those playmates of the late 1890s) playing with Lego's, it did dawn on me that they would probably have loved them if they'd been invented back then. Tib's brother Hobbie would have too. In fact, one could almost imagine Hobbie growing up to invent them. Think about what great fun they had building a playhouse with the wood in the Mueller's basement!

I must confess that seeing the sweet girl so enthusiastically making up stories for the terrific trio makes me wish that she had a) sisters; b) nearby cousins, both in age and geography; or c) neighbors with bookworm kids.

But I will count my blessings that she is blessed with a lovely, vivid imagination!

I wonder if we could start a girl's book group?

High School is Just "Heaven to Betsy"!

That's the name of my review of Maud Hart Lovelace's Heaven to Betsy, which I posted at Epinions the other day in honor of the Harper Betsy-Tacy reissues.

I had a lovely time re-reading and then reviewing HTB. And of course, I found myself wanting to keep going, so I'm now re-reading Betsy in Spite of Herself. Hopefully a review forthcoming in October!

I also got my copy of the reissue of Heaven to Betsy/Betsy in Spite of Herself (they've been bound as one volume) for giveaway! That's right, it's Betsy-Tacy convert week. I found a book-loving family at our church that had never heard of the series. They have two girls, somewhere around the ages of 10 and 12, and I passed the book on to them along with a letter telling them about my own lifelong love of the series.

All the folks participating in the B-T Convert Week have been assigned a society. I'm a Zetamathian, just like Betsy. Go Zets! Though darn, I hear that cute new boy Joe Willard is a Philo...

All this Lovelace reading has me in a very Betsy-Tacy frame of mind, so I've also spent time this week revisiting a B-T writing project I started last year. I'm tentatively calling it "The Betsy-Tacy Guide to Americana." More on this soon, if I'm able to continue working on it.

Blogging Betsy-Tacy

In honor of the reissues of the last six books in the Betsy-Tacy series by Maud Hart Lovelace (Heaven to Betsy, Betsy in Spite of Herself, Betsy Was a Junior, Betsy and Joe, Betsy and the Great World and Betsy's Wedding are being reissued this month as Harper Perennial Classics) a number of writers will be posting on their blogs about the Betsy-Tacy books for the next couple of weeks. The tour is already in progress: today's stop is at Here in the Bonny Glen, where one of my favorite bloggers, Melissa Wiley, weighs in with delightful ruminations on Betsy and Tacy Go Over the Big Hill, the third book in the series.


Big Hill is also one of my favorite books in the series. I reviewed it at Epinions back in 2006, under the title "Hills Were Higher Then." As I wrote in that review:

The older I get, and the more times I read these delightful stories, the more impressed I grow with their narrative artistry. Having recently re-visited these first three books, and knowing so well all that's still to come in the final seven, I'm especially moved by the way Lovelace used the landscape of Deep Valley's hills to portray both the concrete, physical community the girls grew up in, and the symbolic, more poetic image of the "wide world" that surrounded them. In each book, the girls find a way of pushing the boundaries of those hills a little further: from longing to climb the big hill near their homes, to actually doing it, to finally climbing all the way over it (in this installment) and finding a completely different community of people on the other side. Though this is the only book to reference the hills in its title, Lovelace will continue throughout the series to push at the notion of how the ever expanding boundaries of the world shape Betsy -- how the hills that surround her hometown confer familiarity and comfort and yet how they beckon her to step out, confident and curious, into a much wider space.

I just finished my umpteenth re-read of Heaven to Betsy (the first of the high school books) and plan to post a review at Epinions in the coming week, which I'll link here. I also want to do a post about how I first came to love the books, and the long journey to find and read them all!

I was delighted to hear about the blog tour. Although I'm not officially part of it, I hope at least some Betsy-Tacy fans will meander off the main drag and find my little path here, as I plan to post more about these beloved books in the coming couple of weeks. They've been such a huge part of my life for so many years -- what joy to be able to talk about them with other people who love them too!

New Books From Some Favorite Writers

At bedtime the other evening we read Mr. Putter & Tabby Spill the Beans, a new reader from the winning team of author Cynthia Rylant and illustrator Arthur Howard. Thank you to Erin, who put me on to the fact that there was a new one out this fall! Of course we loved it. My favorite part of any Mr. P & T is the almost-surefire moment when the adventure reaches its sweet but often hysterically funny heights, and the sweet girl dissolves into chortles or gives a shout of appreciative laughter. This book did not fail us!

While I'm on the subject of new books from favorite writers, I thought I'd mention a few more I'm looking forward to this autumn.

Children's poet laureate Mary Ann Hoberman, one of my favorite poets for children OR adults, has just come out with her debut novel, Strawberry Hill. It's so bizarre to use the word "debut" in connection with Hoberman, who has been publishing amazing poetry for over fifty years. I'm inspired to see her trying her hand at a new genre. As an added bit of excitement, it's illustrated by Wendy Anderson Halperin, an illustrator whose work I especially love. Halperin illustrated the "Cobble Street Cousins" books, and also the wonderful picture book Homeplace, a library staple we've checked out numerous times over the years.

I just started Strawberry Hill and am already taken by its lovely simplicity. It's the story of a little girl growing up in Connecticut during the Great Depression, and is apparently based on Hoberman's own childhood.

Newbery winner Kate DiCamillo has an intriguing looking new book out (just released this week) called The Magician's Elephant. It sounds like a fascinating fable; since it's by DiCamillo, you know it will be well told.

Sarah Beth Durst, author of Into the Wild and Out of the Wild, has a new YA fantasy arriving in October. It's simply called Ice, and the cover is certainly compelling. I wasn't too sure about my ultimate verdict on Out of the Wild, but the polar bear on that cover really makes me want to pick this one up and give this author another try.

Hunting around to see what some of my favorite children's authors were up to, I discovered that we missed the release of new Alfie book by Shirley Hughes in 2008. It's called Alfie and the Big Boys, and I've already put a request through with our library! While on the subject of Hughes, here's a a fascinating interview with her done just this past spring for the Guardian. There's a wonderful photograph of her too.

And of course, no posting about fall releases would be complete without a big Betsy Ray shout out ("Yoo-hoo! Betsy!") regarding the reissues of the Betsy high school books by Maud Hart Lovelace. I posted about this earlier this year but am getting really excited as the time draws near. I'm one of the Betsy-Tacy fanatics who will be receiving a free copy of the first two books (bound as one) Heaven to Betsy and Betsy in Spite of Herself, on the stipulation that I will share it with someone who doesn't know the series. (They're calling this Betsy-Tacy Convert week...I first heard about it via Facebook, where I'm part of the B-T fan group.) I've already decided to pass it on to two sisters at our church, ages about 9 and 12, who have never read the books. Their mom is delighted...and she's never read them either, so I may actually make three Lovelace converts all at once.

I'm also readying my review of Heaven to Betsy for Epinions, hoping to post it on or very near the release date at the end of the month. I reviewed the first four books in the series a couple of years ago, but for some reason held off on doing the older Betsy books. Now I'm glad I did!

Last Six Betsy-Tacy Books Being Released Again This Fall!

Woo-hoo! Or perhaps that should be "Yoohoo! Betsy!"

Harper's is re-releasing Maud Hart Lovelace's Betsy-Tacy high school & beyond books (Heaven to Betsy, Betsy in Spite of Herself, Betsy was a Junior, Betsy and Joe, Betsy and the Great World, Betsy's Wedding) this coming autumn. You can go to this page at the Betsy-Tacy Society to see the announcement and sneak peek at the covers. You can even pre-order through their gift shop!

I almost swooned when I saw these. They're part of the Harper Perennial Modern Classics line. They've packaged them as two novels per volume (odd choice, but okay, I'll take it) but they're reproducing them with some of Vera Neville's original cover art. Too wonderful that. From the pictures, I think the cover art is from the earlier book in each pairing -- I wonder if they reproduce the art from the other book on the back cover or somewhere inside?

I don't often feel a desire to own another copy/edition of a book I already own, and I already own all the Betsy-Tacy books and the other Deep Valley books as well. But these books are such a major parting of my reading/writing life. So yes, I would love these.

I'll even forgive the publisher for letting Meg Cabot provide one of the forewords (I apologize in advance to any Meg Cabot fans) instead of...well...me. Considering I've never had a book published, for children or otherwise, I can understand why no one called! I can think of other authors, however, whose writing would definitely fit the spirit of Lovelace's world better. Though for all I know, Cabot loves these books dearly and has penned a terrific foreword. (I promise I will eat my Merry Widow hat if she turns out to have written something wonderful.)

Wouldn't it be fun if we all decided to have Betsy-Tacy picnics in honor of the release date in October?

Little Ray of Sunshine

We had a delightful Betsy-Ray-like moment yesterday. The sweet girl had decided to pen "love notes" to me and her Dad (her newest craze) and trailed after me with marker in hand. "How do you spell 'you're a sweetie?'" she wanted to know.

Of course that made me laugh. I was remembering the delightful moment in the Betsy-Tacy books when Mrs. Ray says that Betsy has been making up stories for years. She used to follow me around asking 'how do you spell "going down the street?"

I wonder if I ever trailed after my Mom asking similar questions...