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BETSY-TACY

By Maud Hart Lovelace, illustrations by Lois Lenski

HarperTrophy, 122 pages, $5.95 paper

Though first published 60 years ago, this children’s book presents girls’ friendships in a timeless, unsentimental way. Betsy and Tacy are adventurous girls growing up during the early 1900s in a small Minnesota town. They make a little house out of a piano crate and sing songs about Milwaukee, a place some neighbors have gone to visit. But it’s not all harmony: When Tacy’s baby sister dies, the girls cope by climbing a tree and discussing mortality.