YMMV / Betsy-Tacy

• Aluminum Christmas Trees: During a meeting on class fundraising, Betsy suggests a Leap Year Dance where the girls ask out the boys and pay for the event, which gets chosen and is a big hit. This actually was a tradition from the early 20th century similar to Sadie Hawkins Day, where a woman could propose marriage to a man as long as it was on a Leap Year. This tradition continued into the 1970s.
• Contested Sequel:
  • Betsy Was a Junior is one of the more disliked books by fans, with many claiming that it feels like a slog to get through alongside the hamfisted "sororities are bad because you exclude others" moral. It probably doesn't help that it comes right before fan favorite, Betsy and Joe.
  • Winona's Pony Cart gets this as well as it came out long after the original childhood books were written, with one criticism stating that its writing style makes it feel more like a contemporary 1950's children's book than a Betsy-Tacy book.
• Ensemble Dark Horse: Naifi from Betsy-Tacy Go Over the Big Hill is popular with fans.
• Harsher in Hindsight: At the end of Betsy and the Great World, Betsy is residing in England when World War One begins and countries begin to arm up and join sides. She worries about all the people she's met in England, Germany, and Italy and hopes that they will be alright both during, and after the conflict is over. Unfortunately, the war ended up becoming one of the most bloodiest and destructive conflicts up to that point, which would then help set the stage for what would come in a few decades...
• Hilarious in Hindsight: Dr. Wilson, whose diet theory involves not eating meat or coffee and instead eating fruit, vegetables and whole-grain breads, is a bit ahead of his time for his vegetarian/vegan eating habits that would become increasingly popular decades later. He is likely based on Transcendentalists who practiced this regimen at that time, including Bronson Alcott, the father of Louisa May Alcott. In many ways they were the precursors of modern hippies, from whom the present-day natural food/vegetarian movement evolved.
• Les Yay: Many fans have chosen to read into Betsy and Tacy's relationship as this. In one scene, Betsy even refers to Tacy as being "faithless" to her for marrying Harry so she can't join her on her trip abroad like they planned as children.
  • When Betsy goes to stay with the Mullers for Christmas in Betsy in Spite of Herself, there's a reference to her and Tib kissing each other goodnight. At the time this was probably just viewed as Pseudo-Romantic Friendship.
• Values Dissonance:
  • Although Harry Kerr and Tacy clearly love each other, the age gap in their relationship can be disconcerting to modern readers, especially at their first meeting where 28 year-old Harry falls for a girl who's ten years his junior and a few months away from finishing High School. He pursues her throughout the rest of her senior year and she marries him not long after she graduates.
    • Not long after she graduates from college, actually. We learn in Betsy and Joe that Tacy was planning to attend the German Catholic College in Deep Valley for a program in music education after high school. Betsy and the Great World says that "when she [Tacy] completed her course in public school music that June, she had married Harry Kerr. He was an aggressive young salesman whom she had met at the Rays' four years before." The timeline is a little confused because this should be June 1913, since we hear shortly after that Joe is beginning his senior year of college after graduating high school in 1910, but it's clear that Tacy has been in her post-secondary program for several years and isn't 18 when she and Harry wed.
  • In Betsy & Tacy Go Downtown, the girls go to see a play of Uncle Tom's Cabin. It's made pretty explicit that the actors playing the black characters are white people in blackface.
    • Similarly, in Betsy and Joe, Tony puts on blackface for his musical number at the school show.
  • Near the end of Betsy in Spite of Herself, Betsy learns that her English teacher, Mr. Gaston, has a one-sided crush on her older sister, Juila, who is still a senior at their school. Although the age gap isn't as big as Harry and Tacy (Gaston is 23, Julia's 18), it does have the added Squick of the Teacher/Student power imbalance. Most of the characters find this more amusing than anything, with the girls' own mother being more indignant that Gaston would even consider courting Julia after being so awful to Betsy.
• Values Resonance:
  • The series has a very pro-immigrant stance, which becomes an important part of the plot in both Betsy-Tacy Go Over the Big Hill and Emily of Deep Valley.
  • Mr. and Mrs. Ray's overwhelming support in their daughters' careers, with Julia becoming an opera singer and Betsy becoming a published writer, despite this being a time when most women were expected to only get married and become a homemaker. Things were just starting to change on this. Women going to college was such a stunning idea that Helen Keller's classmates at Radcliffe (Class of '04) considered themselves to be extremely forward-looking, world-changing innovators just for being there.
    • The Rays are honestly amazing parents. When Betsy is going through a depression, her grades are dropping, and is feeling unfulfilled with college, it's Mr. Ray who suggests she go and study abroad instead, reasoning that she would probably learn more in the real world than returning to an environment that she's currently wilting in.
  • Many current high school and college aged readers have said that Emily of Deep Valley 's themes have resonated with them, as the story involves Emily not going to college and staying in Deep Valley, her friends drifting away as they all go their separate ways, and her feeling very lost and lonely while trying to figure out what she wants to do with her life.
  • Many of the books in the series have examples of marital relationships where an emphasis is placed on the two clearly loving and caring for each other, and holding the same interests and beliefs. Some examples are Betsy and Joe's goals of being writers, Juila and Paige who are both musicians and plan on combining their careers together, and Emily and Jed's support for and involvement in helping the Syrian community.
• What Do You Mean, It's Not for Kids?: Used and acknowledged in a chapter in-story. The twelve-year-old trio lose a copy of Mary Elizabeth Braddon's Lady Audley's Secret they borrowed from Tib's maid. Their folks consider such books "trash" and Tib's father actually burned it, meaning they've got to come up with a scheme for a dime (about $2.50 today) to buy a new one, hopefully without their parents finding out. Published in 1862, this book was absolutely real, and one of many sensational dime novels of the time. Said book involves the heroine deserting her child, shoving her first husband down a well, planning to poison her second husband, and committing hotel arson. Betsy aspires to write books just like it.