Betsy-Tacy Connects Five Girls As They Yearn to Be Home for the Holidays

There’s no place like home for the holidays, which is why I’m in Erie, Pennsylvania on December 25th, celebrating Christmas with my parents and brother in the same house as always. In Heather Vogel Frederick’s Home for the Holidays, however, none of the five youngest members of the Mother-Daughter Book Club is spending Christmas at home. Instead, each one finds herself missing home while away on exotic vacations.

I discovered the Mother-Daughter Book Club series for intermediate readers last fall, and I devoured the first four books, the last of which gave every impression of being a series finale. I was surprised, then, to hear that 2011 would bring a new novel featuring these girls tied together by their immersion in classic literature. Home for the Holidays is different from the first four installments in several key ways, but it still is very much in the same vein as the others.

The first major difference that fans will note is the fact that Becca Chadwick, the prissy queen bee who is a primary antagonist to most of the girls in the first two books, gets to speak for herself this time around. Aside from her best friend Megan, she still doesn’t feel a particularly strong connection to the other book club girls, and this year, she has a troubling family secret hanging over her head and deepening her sense of distance.

Usually, the books are divided into four sections with four chapters each, but now that Becca is on board, there are five chapters in each section. However, there are only three sections, and the story takes place over the course of about five weeks instead of the typical almost-year. Hence, there are 15 chapters instead of 16, making this book of pretty typical length for the series, though the chapters in the last section are considerably shorter than those in the first two since everything in that section happens on the same day.

This time, the books under consideration are those in Maud Hart Lovelace’s Betsy-Tacy series. I was excited to see this because my friend Beth, who has also been enjoying the Mother-Daughter Book Club books, has loved Lovelace since she was little. At her recommendation, I read the first couple books a few years back but stopped when my library’s supply ran out. Reading this made me want to pick up those books again.

I do find that there’s an extra layer of fun to be found in these books when one is intimately familiar with the allusions being made, which is probably one of the reasons that my favorite books so far have been the ones focusing on Anne of Green Gables and Pride and Prejudice. Still, I’m familiar enough with Betsy-Tacy that I didn’t feel too out of the loop with the references.

With so many major events occurring and long-running storylines wrapping up in the fourth book, Home for the Holidays feels a bit like a P.S. on the series, though it could also be seen as a sort of transition book. These girls are only sophomores in high school, after all, so there is plenty of potential life in the series still, especially if they deal with smaller chunks of time like this one does.

Here, there are really only two characters facing major changes. Becca’s father is out of work, and tomboy Cassidy could wind up moving back to California if her stepfather accepts a job there. Theirs are the most compelling stories this time around, particularly when it comes to long-term consequences. Megan has a crisis in that her long-distance boyfriend has abruptly ditched her, but as he only entered the series a book ago and didn’t seem likely to be a permanent part of it, the break-up doesn’t have as big of an impact as Emma’s major relationship catastrophe in the fourth book. Speaking of Emma, while this bookworm is my favorite character, she doesn’t have a lot to do in this book. Mostly she just reacts to Jess, whose sledding injury prevents her from going to Switzerland for Christmas and who Emma suspects of getting involved with another boy even though she is dating Emma’s older brother Darcy.

The book introduces a few new characters, but the one who adds the most is Becca’s grandmother. I love the way that Vogel has turned the book club into a three-generation thing, and it seems especially sweet that Becca’s grandmother is the one who selects the Betsy-Tacy books for the girls’ next project. I also love the tea shop opened by Megan’s grandmother, especially all the literary quotes on the walls. It seems like a perfect hangout for the girls, a place as cheerful and welcoming as Pushing Daisies’ Pie Hole.

The book begins with Thanksgiving and ends with New Year’s Eve, but the heart of the story is Christmas, which finds each of the girls someplace rather exotic. Jess and Emma are at a New England lodge run by Jess’s relatives, Megan and Becca are on a cruise off the coast of Florida with their families and Cassidy is with her Mom, stepdad and sisters in California, trying to decide whether she would be okay with them moving back to the state she called home for a dozen years. More than before, it struck me how isolated Cassidy is. Despite having a group of friends, she really doesn’t have a “best friend,” and although she has always been part of a hockey team, in some ways, she is more of a loner than anyone else in the group.

It’s fun to be able to visit with her and the others this time around for such a festive outing. I love Christmas stories, and that’s mostly what this is. As before, I usually found it pretty easy to keep the girls’ voices straight, though I sometimes caught myself mixing up Megan and Becca and, to a lesser extent, Jess and Emma; usually I can tell Emma is speaking because, like me, she’s constantly making references to books (though with me, it’s also TV and movies). Still, I think the characters are definitely distinct from each other, and it will be interesting to see how Becca develops if the series continues, since this is the first time we’ve been able to get her side of the story. As always, it took me a few pages to get used to the present-tense narration, but once I did, I was fully immersed in the story and could barely put it down.

Because this is the fifth book in the series, you really would do best to start from the beginning before opening this one. However, I think it would work as a stand-alone holiday story; you would just be missing some of the significance of certain scenes and spoiling earlier plot developments if you read it before any of the others. While the target audience is girls in middle school and high school, I think anyone who understands the power of books to forge friendships and help us make sense of our lives could easily enjoy Home for the Holidays.

Jane Austen Helps Bring the Mother-Daughter Book Club Series to a Fantastic Finish

In the past few years, I find that I have turned into something of a Jane Austen enthusiast. I suppose I won’t be able to call myself a full-blown Janeite until I’ve read the rest of her novels, but I’m a third of the way there, anyway. My first immersion began during college, when Sense and Sensibility, despite getting off to a slow start for me, wound up being just what I needed to snap me out of my post-9/11 paralysis. This book, so beloved by the lit professor who sparked such energetic discussions, helped my focus to return to all that is good in the world: things like sisterhood, friendship, long letters, lush landscapes and, of course, true love. Several years later, my bestest book buddy Beth prevailed upon me to read Pride and Prejudice, so I did, and I loved it as much as she assured me I would. I have a hard time deciding which of the novels I prefer; S&S is quieter, while P&P is amusingly chaotic. But the latter is definitely the right choice for inclusion in the Mother-Daughter Book Club series.

This charming intermediate series that I discovered a couple months ago encompasses four novels. Each book is broken up into four seasons, with each of four girls narrating one chapter every season. As far as I know, there will be no others; Heather Vogel Frederick certainly wraps things up in a way that feels like a conclusion to the series, and it syncs up nicely with the fact that there are four narrators. Of course, if she were to publish another installment, I would snatch it right up. Pies and Prejudice finds the girls in their first year of high school, and all of them must adjust to big changes in their lives as threads that got their start as far back as the first book finally find resolution.

The main players, as before, are Emma Hawthorne, Jess Delaney, Cassidy Sloane and Megan Wong, along with nicer-than-before-but-still-snotty Becca Chadwick. Together with their quirky moms and a couple of elderly honorary members, they continue to find pleasure in reading classic literature and discussing it over snacks (prepared, hopefully, by Cassidy’s cooking show host mom and not Megan’s health nut mom). Pride and Prejudice is a novel that had been mentioned previously as a book that the girls weren’t quite ready to tackle, but this year, it’s too perfect to pass up. That’s because Emma, the bookworm of the bunch and the one who reminds me most of myself, is about to have all her Anglophile dreams come true with a year-long move to Bath, England (incidentally, one of my favorite stops when I was in England myself). While she and her librarian mother, who have already read Austen backward and forward anyway, drink in all of the Austen culture they can, the other four girls become acquainted with her classic characters, and as in previous books, certain aspects of her novel seem to resonate particularly well with their lives.

Emma’s living the dream in England, but her life is complicated by yet another in the series’ string of Mean Girls. Annabelle doesn’t actually show up in the book that much, but she wreaks major havoc when she does. Meanwhile, although Skype makes connecting with her friends easier and even allows her and her mom to participate in book club meetings, Emma misses her boyfriend Stewart, a sensitive fellow bookworm who seems to understand her better than anyone she knows – and with whom she shared her very first kiss before leaving for Bath. Annoyingly, England also provides Emma with her own version of stiff, awkward Mr. Collins, and though she generally puts up with him, his unwelcome advances cause some problems for her.

Jess is having a much better time of it this year than last. Now in her second year at a nearby exclusive girls’ boarding school, she’s rooming with kindred spirits and no longer feels antagonized by her former roommate. She discovers an interest in wild animal rehabilitation, and she spearheads an effort to raise money to bring Emma home for spring break after it becomes apparent how unpleasant Annabelle is making her life. She’s really coming into her own, though she still has to deal with some insecurity when it comes to figuring out what she wants to do with her life and trying to work out whether there’s any chance that her long-time and now long-distance crush, Emma’s gregarious brother Darcy, might see her as something more than his kid sister’s best friend.

Megan feels like a fish out of water in high school, especially with Becca’s clique dissolved and neither Emma nor Jess around to latch onto. Even though she’s managed to make a name for herself as a young fashion designer, she feels totally out of place in this new environment, which leads her to take on a new role: that of fashion blogger. Make that anonymous fashion blogger. Taking her cues from Austen’s penchant for searing social commentary, she snaps photos of “fashion faux pas” that she sees around school and posts them with snarky captions for the world to see. This is the storyline that made me squirm the most, since it was obvious that she would eventually be found out and have to face some unpleasant consequences as a result.

Megan is one of two book club members to get pretty chummy with one of the English lads whose parents swap houses with Emma’s, and it’s fairly apparent that Simon, the younger of the two, is supposed to remind readers of affable Mr. Bingley. Megan, however, behaves in a manner not representative of empathetic Jane Bennet at all, and after three books’ worth of moral development on her part, it’s disappointing to see her lapsing into this person who sits around making snide comments about everybody’s fashion choices. Nonetheless, she is otherwise likable here, and her close relationship with her grandmother continues to flourish, especially once the latter volunteers to supervise the girls’ efforts to raise the money for Emma’s ticket by baking and selling pies – hence, the title of the book.

We get our biggest nod to Pride and Prejudice with Cassidy, the tomboyish hockey player who, unlike her fellow book club members, has never had a crush on anyone and thinks the whole romance thing is nothing but a nuisance. She’s generally popular with her male peers, who pretty much see her as one of the guys, but any hint of mushy stuff and she wants to gag. Her gag reflex is strongest in reaction to Simon’s older brother Tristan, an arrogant ice skater with whom she is horrified to find herself in frequent close contact, as he needs a partner to practice with for a competition at the school year’s end. She agrees to this only because their teacher, former Olympian and current book club member Eva Bergson, has so enthusiastically agreed to help Cassidy set up a hockey club for young girls and praised Cassidy’s coaching skills. She can’t bear to say no to someone who has been so encouraging to her, but Tristan has been nothing but a thorn in her side since he arrived. Elizabeth-Darcy echoes abound here, and it’s fun to imagine just how Frederick will manage to pull off the inevitable wearing down of Cassidy’s negative first impression. Along with this, we see her gradually becoming used to her sister being away at college and to being a big sister herself, and it’s sweet to see her relationship with her lovable stepfather Stanley, which got off to such a rocky start, truly flourish here.

A lot happens in this fourth novel that, more than the others, is fairly dependent upon having read other books in order to get a full appreciation of the story and the directions in which it takes certain characters. Although the books are somewhat formulaic and fairly predictable to those who have read the novels at the heart of each volume, Frederick tossed in some twists here that truly surprised me, and my emotional investment at this point in the series was such that one of them actually made me cry, a true rarity for the girl with the frustratingly robotic tear ducts. As someone who no doubt would have been considered a spinster in Austen’s day, I have to chuckle a bit at how neatly Frederick pairs up all of these teens, most of whom are not yet sixteen. To be fair, though, Emma herself, who narrates the last chapter, notes that none of them can tell what the future can bring, and three of the five couples, while appealing, seem as likely as not to be involved in heady first romances that are merely remembered fondly years later. Two couples do seem destined for the altar a few years down the line, but there’s so much build-up with them that I would have felt cheated if Vogel hadn’t left us with some degree of assurance there. The way in which she manages it is understated but exhilarating nonetheless.

I would encourage any Austen fan, young or old, to read this book, but I would also caution patience. Don’t just pick up the one with all the Austen echoes. Start off with the first book and work your way to the grand finale. It’ll take a little bit of a time investment, but it’s well worth it to follow these girls from the beginning. If you’re already the sort of reader who finds Austen appealing, chances are that you will fall in love with this series as whole-heartedly as I did.

Letters Make the World Shrink in Dear Pen Pal

When I was a kid, I really wanted a pen pal. Oh, I had a cousin out of town who I’d write to now and then, but I wanted a friendship forged entirely from pen and paper with someone on the other side of the country or the world. It wasn’t until the past decade, with my immersion in the Internet, that this longing was fulfilled, and I have delighted in making dozens of friends online, a few of whom I feel as though I’ve known my whole life. And of that select group, I’ve actually gone on to meet four. What a thrill that was! I hope there are more meetings to come.

In Dear Pen Pal, the third book in the Mother-Daughter Book Club intermediate series by Heather Vogel Frederick, Emma Hawthorne, the character with whom I most identify, embraces the pen pal experience as whole-heartedly as I would have if I’d gotten my act together and found a pen pal at that age. The others in the club? Not so much. Writing a letter feels too much like homework. And what makes their mothers think they have anything in common with these girls way out in Wyoming, anyway? But as the year wears on, they come to find comfort in the idea of confiding in an unseen friend hundreds of miles away, especially when they have a lot on their minds.

Of the four books in the series thus far, Dear Pen Pal is the only one that is focused on a book with which I had no prior familiarity. I need to read Daddy Longlegs one of these days; Frederick certainly makes it sound appealing. While I did miss the fun of picking up on all of the references to the book that the mothers and daughters are reading together, I was wholly in love with the series at this point and didn’t need the tie-in to a beloved novel to keep me engaged.

A lot is happening in this installment. It’s eighth grade, a big year for the girls, who include bookish Emma, shy farm girl Jess Delaney, tomboyish hockey player Cassidy Sloane, artistic only child Megan Wong and flirtatious Becca Chadwick. Becca is really more of a side player, since she’s the only one of the book club daughters not to narrate her own chapter, but she’s still worth mentioning, since after two books’ worth of hostility, she’s finally been successfully integrated into this group. She still occasionally exhibits catty behavior, but on the whole, these girls have resolved their issues with each other.

But one thing that every book in the series has is at least one snotty girl who makes life miserable for one or more of the book club members. This time, it’s Savannah, Jess’s roommate at the prestigious girls’ boarding school she reluctantly agreed to attend. Jess is very shy, though less withdrawn than at the beginning of the series, so it’s a real struggle for her to embrace this new challenge at first, even though she’s a brilliant student. Stuck-up Senator’s daughter Savannah doesn’t help. But might there be more to her than meets the eye?

Each of the girls has challenges to face this year as big changes come into their lives. For Emma, it’s been a pretty good year, since she has a boyfriend - or “sort-of boyfriend,” anyway - in quiet, bumbling kindred spirit Stewart, Becca’s brother. Plus, she’s grown closer to grandmotherly Eva Bergson, a former Olympic ice skater who is giving her lessons. Eva has a great gift for encouraging others, and she urges Emma to use her writing skills to protest the unpopular new uniforms at her school. I confess myself surprised that the uniform bothered Emma; like her, I have never been fashion-conscious, and it was a relief to me to get to high school and find that I no longer had to worry about getting made fun of for my wardrobe. I would’ve thought the same would apply to her. Maybe she just empathizes with her more stylish pals, particularly Megan.

Megan’s grandmother Gigi becomes fast friends with Eva, particularly after both of them begin joining in on the book club meetings. Gigi is from Hong Kong, and she loves fashion just as much as Megan does. Indeed, they seem to have just about everything in common, while Megan and her mom are exact opposites. This year, Megan reminded me very much of Claudia, the Japanese girl in the Babysitters’ Club series who is artistic, whose parents don’t approve of her aspirations and who is especially close to her grandmother. Gigi becomes a permanent part of the household, but the squabbles between her and her daughter intensify, and just as Megan was caught in the cross-fire between Becca and her book club buddies in the second book, she’s stuck in the middle here as well.

Never having had a sibling, she’s jealous of Cassidy, whose recently married mother announces that a baby is on the way. But while Cassidy is grudgingly coming to accept the presence of her mild-mannered stepfather Stanley, she is disgusted by the prospect of a baby and glowers whenever anyone mentions it. Though she hates to admit it, she also is having a hard time coming to terms with the fact that her sister Courtney will be going off to college in the fall. While they’ve had a rocky relationship at times, her impending departure makes her realize how important Courtney is to her.

Through it all, they write to their pen pals, who write back with dramas and dreams of their own, and this book follows the pattern set by the others by concluding with a big trip, this time to Wyoming so they can all meet each other and connect on another level. It’s an engrossing book deepened by the expansion of focus into three generations instead of just two. There is a certain rhythm to these books that makes some of the events fairly predictable, but I don’t mind that, since the novel takes us in such wonderful directions, and occasionally it pulls off a surprise or two as well.

The entire series is a testament to the power of the written word to bring people together, but there’s a deeper layer of that here, with so much of the writing and reading in this book being a true dialogue. It just goes to show that there are many ways to make friends - but keeping them will always involve the same type of kindness and consideration that these imperfect but endearing girls display in their best moments.

Heather Vogel Frederick Pays Tribute to Anne of Green Gables in Much Ado About Anne

One of my favorite literary heroines is Anne Shirley of L. M. Montgomery’s Anne of Green Gables. I love that book, so when I saw that it was the subject of the second installment of The Mother-Daughter Book Club series by Heather Vogel Frederick, that was what really convinced me to pick up the series. I loved the thought of reading a book steeped in references to irrepressible Anne, dreamy Gilbert and picturesque Avonlea, and once I finished the first book in the series, I knew that I would enjoy Vogel’s story and characters just as much as the classic to which she was paying tribute.

Much Ado About Anne finds Emma Hawthorne, Jess Delaney, Cassidy Sloane and Megan Wong about to embark upon their second year with the book club that their mothers instituted. These four live in Concord, Massachusetts, an ideal setting for a series about the way literature can help to shape a life. Frederick makes note of all the famous authors who once lived in this tranquil New England town. In the first book, Louisa May Alcott got the most attention; this time around, she devotes a chapter to a field trip to Walden Pond, which involves plenty of discussion about Henry David Thoreau, whose passion for the environment fits in very well with the book’s most pressing storyline.

Quiet, intellectual Jess, an animal lover whose mother only recently returned from a stint as the star of a soap opera filmed in New York, lives on historic Half Moon Farm. Even stylish Megan, who is no big fan of tromping around outdoors, agrees that there is something magical about this place. So everyone is horrified to learn that, due to a change in tax law, the Delaneys stand in very real danger of losing their farm. Even worse, a developer has already expressed interest in paving over the plot of land and building condominiums. Jess feels the same sense of deep attachment to Half Moon Farm that Anne does to Green Gables, the beautiful home where she comes to live with the stern Marilla and her gentle brother Matthew after they agree to take her in, despite having requested that the orphanage send them a boy to help with the farm work.

As with the first book in the series, Much Ado About Anne is written in the present tense and divided into four sections - one for each season. Once again, each section contains four chapters, each narrated by a different member of the book club. Underneath the name of the narrator for the chapter is a quote from either Anne of Green Gables or Anne of Avonlea; the girls read both books over the course of the year, up from just one in the first year - though admittedly, Little Women is an especially long book. Anne’s love of language, her propensity for getting into mischief, her knack for finding kindred spirits and her complex relationship with the dashing Gilbert Blythe all resonate with at least one of the girls, but it’s Montgomery’s profound sense of place that really sets the tone of this second installment. Most people who have read and cherished Anne of Green Gables would be disturbed at the thought of that gorgeous estate falling into the hands of developers, so the comparison makes Jess’s predicament seem all the more poignant.

While Jess frets over the potential loss of her farm, her best friend Emma joins the school newspaper, an ideal step for an aspiring writer. Unfortunately, this brings her into even closer contact than usual with Becca Chadwick, the Queen Bee of the mean girls at Walden Middle School. Becca and her overbearing mother have already invaded the book club, making it feel like less of a safe haven and more of a war zone. In the midst of all this Chadwick saturation, Becca’s older brother Stewart, a klutzy bookworm, becomes much more prominent, and as she begins getting to know him, Emma is startled to find herself wondering if her raging crush on handsome jock Zach Norton might be fading.

Cassidy doesn’t want anything to do with all this boy-crazy nonsense. She’s the only one of the book club girls who doesn’t have the hots for someone, and she doesn’t intend for that to change anytime soon. In fact, she’s downright hostile to the idea, which may be partly because her mother, former supermodel and current host of a cooking show shot in her home, has begun dating again. To Cassidy, a daddy’s girl through and through, this feels like a deep betrayal of her father, who died in a car accident two years earlier. Everything that we see of Stanley Kincaid suggests that mild-mannered accountant is a kind, generous man who wants to reach out to Cassidy, but she is too hurt to be open to that possibility.

The depth of her resentment becomes plain in the chapter in which Stanley takes her to a Bruins game for her birthday. I have a young friend who, like Cassidy, is a middle-schooler who plays on a local hockey team and adores the Bruins. Recently, she got to attend a game with her family, so reading this chapter, I felt as though I was able to experience her excitement. Cassidy can’t help being caught up in the thrill of the game, but that doesn’t stop her from seething when someone makes the mistake of asking if Stanley is her dad. The quote for this chapter is the only reference to the saddest event in Anne of Green Gables, and it’s presented in such a way that someone who hasn’t read the book might not be able to guess the context. It surprised me that Much Ado About Anne never mentions this moment directly, since there are several references to the death of a main character in Little Women in the first book. I wonder if someone complained about spoilers and Frederick decided to avoid that this time around?

Megan, who was so antagonistic to Emma, Jess and Cassidy at the beginning of the series, has been fully integrated into the group, but although she now is disgusted with Becca’s mean behavior, she doesn’t want to totally abandon her friendship with Becca and her cronies Ashley and Jen. After all, they have a lot of things in common with her that the other three don’t, most notably a passion for fashion. But Becca has been so cruel for so long that Jess, Cassidy and especially Emma have adopted an Us and Them attitude about her and her friends, leaving Megan is a tough spot. If she continues to hang around with them, Emma and her friends will feel betrayed. While this is largely Jess’s story, I find Megan the most interesting character to watch, since she is the only one with one foot in both camps. She is in a position to do what I had hoped the heroic Jack would do after spending a week with the Others in season three of LOST: use her knowledge of both groups of figure out a path to diplomacy. For much of the first book, Megan comes across as a pretty frivolous character, but in this book, she shows real maturity.

It may help that as a result of a serendipitous encounter with a pair of fashion designers during a trip to New York at the end of the previous book, she has now been given a rare chance to follow her passion all the way to the pages of a premiere fashion magazine. She spends all year working on designs for the feature they intend to do on her in their new teen magazine, and even her mother, an ardent environmentalist who wishes Megan’s goals involved the betterment of Earth and humanity, asserts that she is very proud of her.

Frederick has created several wonderful characters who struggle together to overcome the trials of middle school. Their mothers are just as richly drawn, and it’s especially great to get to know Jess’s mother, who’s just as warm and encouraging as the rest, since I spent much of the first book suspecting that she would never return to Concord on a permanent basis. These girls feel very realistic, and they certainly don’t always make the most noble decisions. I was particularly disappointed in the girls - sans Megan - for concocting a prank to humiliate Becca on live television. Did she deserve it? Probably. But shame on them for stooping to her level. As in the first book, however, the girls learn from their mistakes, and this incident has deep repercussions driving several key events in the book.

I’ve started in on the third volume, in which the focus is on a book I’ve never heard of, but that doesn’t matter to me. I’m glad that allusions to Anne led me to this series, but Frederick has more than demonstrated that these are books that can stand on their own merits.

Pre-Teen Girls Bond Over Books in The Mother-Daughter Book Club

Not long ago, I was shelving books in the intermediate section of the bookstore where I work, and one of the titles caught my eye. The Mother-Daughter Book Club. I’d never heard of it before, but I thought that seemed like a pretty cool concept, and once I saw that it was the first installment of a series whose subsequent volumes included copious references to Anne of Green Gables and Pride and Prejudice, I decided that I needed to investigate further. I quickly put all four books on hold at the library, and it wasn’t long before I concluded that this was a series I would definitely want to see through to the finish.

Heather Vogel Frederick’s The Mother-Daughter Book Club takes place over the course of nearly a year, starting on the first day of school and extending into the summer. One of the first things I noticed about the series was that it is written in the present tense, which I tend to find rather annoying in fiction, but after a few pages, it really didn’t bother me. The book is divided into four sections, each simply named for the season, and within each section are four chapters. These have no titles; instead, the name of the girl who is narrating is listed at the top, and just underneath it is a quote from Little Women, the book that the girls are taking the year to read. The order of these chapters changes with each section; they are sequenced so that, generally speaking, the character at the center of the chapter’s most dramatic event serves as narrator. Each of the four girls has particular quirks that help distinguish her voice from the others.

Emma Hawthorne is the first character we meet. She lives in a cozy Cape Cod cottage with her father, a freelance writer, and her mother, a librarian and the driving force behind the idea of instituting the mother-daughter book club that is so central to the series. This is a tight-knit family, and Emma almost always gets along with her parents and her easy-going older brother Darcy, whose athleticism and good looks make him as popular around school as she is derided. Like the mother who named her children after characters in Jane Austen novels, Emma is a bookworm who has read dozens of classics, even though she’s only eleven. An aspiring writer with no interest in fashion, she nonetheless is embarrassed that most of her wardrobe consists of hand-me-downs from an older girl at church, since several girls at school give her a hard time about it.

Jess Delaney is Emma’s best friend. A quiet animal lover who lives with her father and younger twin brothers, she also endures relentless teasing, though in her case it’s generally connected to the fact that she lives on a farm. “Goat Girl” is the nickname of choice, and though she begins to find her voice later in the novel, Jess initially suffers in silence, rarely speaking except in the exclusive company of Emma or her family. Another source of scorn is the fact that her mother skipped town for a shot at stardom on a cheesy soap opera. Now Jess, the only book club member to attend without her mother, watches her on TV after school every day but wishes she could have her at home instead of in New York City, and it frightens her when she hears rumblings of divorce in the musings of the townspeople.

Cassidy Sloane is new in town. She, too, has just one parent, but unlike Jess, she knows with certainty that her father is not coming back. That’s because he was killed in a car accident last year, when they still lived in California. Now her mother, a former supermodel, has uprooted her older sister Courtney and her to New England in order to be closer to their grandparents. So deep is Cassidy’s grief that she initially comes across as surly and aggressive, especially to her mom and sister, but this tomboy begins to mellow out as she develops a close friendship with Jess and Emma through the book club their parents initially force on them. Cassidy is even less interested in fashion than Emma and Jess; her hair is in a constant state of tangled frizz, and she is violently opposed to dresses. Her greatest passion is sports, especially hockey, and another reason for her dour demeanor toward the beginning of the book is that she has learned that there is no girls’ hockey team in the immediate area, a problem to which she and her new friends conspire to find a clever solution.

Finally, Megan Wong is a member of the snobby clique known as the Fab Four. Led by Becca Chadwick, a mean-spirited girl who seems to take after her battle axe of a mother, this little group makes life miserable for the other three with well-timed, withering slights. What makes this especially unbearable for Emma is the fact that Megan used to be every bit as close to her as Jess. But then Megan’s father invented a gadget that made him a millionaire, and Megan was absorbed into the popular group, leaving babyish Emma behind. A Chinese American and only child, she battles constantly with her mother, who is a gung-ho activist who dreams of Megan pursuing a career as an environmental lawyer. Whenever Megan tries to protest that she longs to be a fashion designer, her mother chides her for her frivolity. Initially, Megan’s voice isn’t very pleasant to slip into, since she is largely sarcastic and snotty, but joining the book club gradually chips away at her steely demeanor until she realizes how much she misses the fun she and Emma used to have.

The series takes place in Concord, Massachusetts, a town of incredible historical and literary significance that I had the pleasure of visiting last year. Because the girls are reading Little Women, the book is loaded with references to the novel and to its author, Louisa May Alcott, but she’s hardly the only writer to merit a mention. Emma’s cat is named Melville after the author of Moby Dick. Cassidy orchestrates a prank that occurs next to Ralph Waldo Emerson’s grave in Sleepy Hollow Cemetery, and though Washington Irving’s The Legend of Sleepy Hollow is set in Sleepy Hollow, New York, that story is her source of inspiration.

The book also draws from more recent culture. For instance, Jess’s father has two big Belgian draft horses named Led and Zep in honor of the band Led Zeppelin. Emma makes several allusions to Rosalind Wiseman’s Queen Bees and Wannabes: Helping Your Daughter Survive Cliques, Gossip, Boyfriends, and Other Realities of Adolescence, the self-help book from which the movie Mean Girls was adapted. Most notably, the Winter section is largely concerned with the middle school production of Disney’s Beauty and the Beast, in which Megan and the rest of the Fab Four desperately want plum parts, leading them to be even meaner than usual to the girl who is awarded the starring role of Belle, especially since she gets to act opposite Zach Norton, upon whom most of the girls in their class have raging crushes.

I found The Mother-Daughter Book Club an engaging and refreshing read. It grapples with many of the issues that pre-teens face, from bullying and burgeoning hormones to family squabbles and figuring out what their passions are. The series emphasizes the value of literature as a unifying force and a lens through which to examine everyday concerns. What’s more, it encourages girls moving into their teen years to make an effort to maintain their bonds with their families, even if that just means setting aside one day a month to do something special together, and to embrace the differences of their peers instead of treating them with derision. The book has an extremely moral core to it, and there are consequences when these girls make decisions that are harmful to others.

To help drive home some of the issues raised in the novel, Fredericks includes a discussion guide in the back of the book. Among the questions is an inquiry as to whether the reader might be interested in participating in such a club herself. I know of at least one friend who participates in a mother-daughter book club; I don’t know if this book had anything to do with its inception, but if Frederick helps to get girls and their parents interested in forming such clubs all around the country, that can only be a good thing.