As cheerful as a cup of tea, and ten times as stimulating, is this spirited account of Betsy Ray's Junior year at Deep Valley High. Those were the days when the automobile was a "horseless carriage" and a lady's hat a substantial article for protecting her head! But different though dress and customs were, the heart of teenage girls was the same as today, and their problems and aspirations identical.

How to ensnare masculine hearts (specifically Joe Willard, with his blond good looks and intriguing air of self-reliance) is, of course, Betsy's primary concern. There are scholastic obstacles to hurdle, like Cicero and herbariums for Mr. Gaston's botany class. Taking the place of absent sister Julia in the family circle, competing in the annual Essay Contest, keeping old friends like Tony and making new ones—these are some of the problems that Betsy encounters in her junior year, with gay and rueful consequences.

As always, merry, loyal, Tacy Kelly is her able accomplice in having fun, together with Camey, Winona, and others of the Crowd. And that other member of Betsy's deathless triumvirate, Tib Muller, is back in Deep Valley, devastating the boys with her golden and tinkling laugh. Football games and dances, rivalry between the Philomathians and Zetamathians, Sunday night lunches, a nearly disastrous experiment with a Greek-letter sorority, the attentions of a new beau, Dave Hunt, almost succeed in taking Betsy's mind off Joe Willard.

She learns that a large, flexible Crowd is much more rewarding than a small, exclusive sorority. And from the welter of frivolous things, the ones that really matter emerge more plainly—like her ambition to write. Betsy is growing up, in her own funny, honest, breathless, irrepressibly Betsy-like way, along with that golden era re-created so heartwarmingly in Betsy Was a Junior. 

From the dust jacket