Betsy and Tacy were good friends first. Then Tib moved into the neighborhood, and the three of them started playing together. The grown-up people thought they would start quarreling with each other. But they didn't. They quarreled with Betsy's and Tacy's big sisters, who were bossy, but they never quarreled among themselves.

They were not as good as they might have been - they cooked up awful messes and daubed themselves with mud and cut each other's hair off - but they always managed to have a good time.

Ever since their first publication in the 1940s, the Betsy-Tacy stories have been loved by each generation of young readers.