Betsy-Tacy

Betsy Ray turns five in 1897 in Deep Valley, Minnesota, and a family with a red-haired daughter moves in across the street. Tacy Kelly is shy to the point of hiding, and the friendship the next nine books rest on starts at that birthday party. The scale of the book is set there and never rises above it.

Lovelace keeps everything at the girls' eye level. They start school, they make a playhouse out of a piano box, they dress up to go calling. Betsy invents constantly, a wagon that can go anywhere, a picnic where they fly on the clouds, and the book puts the inventions on the page with the same weight as the errands without ever nudging the reader about which is which. Two real things happen underneath. Betsy's sister Margaret is born and Betsy is jealous before she is proud. Tacy's baby sister Beatrice dies, and shy Tacy is the one who needs holding while Betsy does the holding.

Almost nothing occurs by adult measure, and a reader expecting incident gets a hundred pages of two small children and their errands. The last chapter brings in Tib, which is really the opening of the next book rather than the close of this one. It lands read aloud to a child around the girls' own age. Deep Valley is Mankato, and Lovelace is writing her own childhood down at the height it happened.