Emily of Deep Valley

On Mankato, Maud Hart Lovelace, and cultivating the soil we're standing in

I’m aware that I am, at this point, clearly abusing the whole idea of summer re-runs, but bear with me: September is a time when all systems are running at full steam here, and I’m barely keeping up with the back-to-school sign-ups (why are there so many), the new routines, the Things My Daughters Need (again, why are there so many), etc. So I’ll ask for one more week before I resume writing new reviews.

But! Where better to close the summer than with a little Maud Hart Lovelace¹? I mentioned earlier that my daughter and I spent a week in Maud’s Mankato, Minnesota, this summer—the hometown behind her fictional Deep Valley—and I couldn’t resist sharing this post with you, which is a review not just for Emily of Deep Valley but for all of Lovelace’s Deep Valley books. Which make excellent school-year pleasure reading, by the way. May you love them as much as we do!

When I finally picked up Mitali Perkins’s lauded Steeped in Stories, I was delighted to find that six of the seven children’s books she lists as her favorites were my favorites, too. But best of all, the seventh—Emily of Deep Valley—was a book so brand new to me that I’d never even heard of it. I’d read the first few Betsy-Tacy books when my girls were very small, but apart from that, I knew nothing about Maud Hart Lovelace’s work. And I’d certainly never read Emily of Deep Valley.

That, my friends, has been remedied—and swiftly!

Perhaps it’s too simplistic to refer to Maud Hart Lovelace as a “Minnesotan L.M. Montgomery,” but that’s the most concise way I can think of to send all you Anne of Green Gables fans out in search of this book immediately. I’ll start there: if you love L.M. Montgomery’s books, look up Maud Hart Lovelace post haste!

She’s best known for her Betsy-Tacy books, but what I didn’t realize is that the Betsy-Tacy series, much like Montgomery’s Anne series, follows its characters into adulthood. Emily of Deep Valley is the stand-alone story of Emily Webster, a girl just graduating high school a few years after Betsy and Tacy. She feels on the outside of her friends, who are all heading off to college while Emily stays home to care for her grandfather.

This is a story rich in themes of sacrifice and love, one that challenges readers to stop looking over the fence at the next green field and start cultivating the soil they’re standing in. Emily keenly feels the boundaries placed about her, and yet she learns to flourish there—ultimately getting to know and care for a community of Syrian refugees that many in her town have overlooked.

Emily of Deep Valley is a sweet story, yes, but its roots go deep: Lovelace asks meaningful questions about race and relationships (Emily’s first love interest is most emphatically Not a Keeper) and true friendship. And it’s one that will send readers—in our house, at least—into the rest of Lovelace’s books, eager to read them all.

1. Fun fact! She and I share a birthday—not her legal birthday, but her actual one. Pretty rad.