One day in winter, she sees a group of boys throw Kalil to the ice on a frozen pond. She writes letters that go mostly unanswered she signs up for dancing lessons and puts together a study group on Robert Browning. Then everyone leaves, and Emily is lonely. Self-conscious about her house, which is full of old-fashioned trinkets, she decides to jazz up the occasion by serving frogs’ legs-the raw materials peddled to her by two young Syrian boys named Yusef and Kalil. When fall comes, Emily throws a farewell party for her friends, who are headed to college. “It’s-part of growing up in America,” she tells him. Don mocks Emily for feeling patriotic and sentimental.

They see each other on Memorial Day, then called Decoration Day-the highlight of the year for Emily’s grandfather, who fought for the Union at Gettysburg. She has a crush on an obnoxious boy named Don, who shares her interest in literature but seems determined to be rude. Emily, in contrast with the gregarious heroines of the “Betsy-Tacy” series, is awkward and introverted: she has to buy her own graduation flowers, she’s never invited to coed parties, and she doesn’t know how to dance. She’s an orphan, and, since she lives with her elderly grandfather, who requires looking after, she won’t be going to college in the fall. ever.” The year is 1912, and Emily Webster, who has just graduated, looks back at the red brick schoolhouse, sad to be released. The book begins: “It’s the last day of high school. But I recently decided to reread something else by Lovelace: her one stand-alone young-adult book, “Emily of Deep Valley,” published in 1950, in which the shy protagonist of the title becomes Deep Valley’s premier advocate for the Syrian immigrants who live on the outskirts of town. In times of strife, I sometimes return to my “Betsy-Tacy” books, escaping American political catastrophe for a world of ice-skating parties and Gibson girls.

Today, there’s an annual Betsy-Tacy convention and a Betsy-Tacy Society, which has turned Lovelace’s Mankato home into a museum. (Tacy, circumspect and demure, was based on Lovelace’s best friend, Frances Kenney.) The ten “Betsy-Tacy” books span the time from the end of the nineteenth century to the beginning of the First World War. Lovelace, like her character Betsy, was determined, imaginative, and a born writer she published her first short story when she was eighteen, in the Los Angeles Times Magazine.

The writer Maud Hart Lovelace, who died in 1980, at the age of eighty-seven, is best known for her semi-autobiographical “Betsy-Tacy” children’s-book series-a fizzy, modish, cult-favorite cousin of “Anne of Green Gables” and the “Little House” books, centered on two best friends in the fictional Deep Valley, which Lovelace based on her home town of Mankato, Minnesota.

Maud hart lovelace society