Top Ten Tuesday: Satisfying Book Series

Welcome to this week's edition of Top Ten Tuesday which is hosted by That Artsy Reader Girl. This week's theme is Satisfying Book Series and it was hard to pick just ten.

Betsy-Tacy by Maud Hart Lovelace (1940).  Nearly everyone who knows me can tell you this is my favorite series (I think my favorite book in the series is Betsy and Joe). It starts when Betsy, age 5, meets Tacy, the new girl across the street, and they become lifelong friends.  On Friday, I will head to Mankato, Minnesota for my fourth or fifth Betsy-Tacy convention!

Williamsburg Novels by Elswyth Thane.   My all-time favorite runner up series follows a family from pre-Revolutionary America to World War II, including one book in which the characters dance to the Merry Widow Waltz like Betsy Ray and her friends.   Start with book 1, Dawn’s Early Light (1943).  

Beany Malone series by Lenora Mattingly Weber.  One of the reasons I liked reading about Beany and her family is that she is Catholic in an era when religion was rarely mentioned in juvenile fiction.  I found these books in my grade school library.  The first book is Meet the Malones (1943), in which their reporter father goes off to cover WWII, thinking he’s left the children with a housekeeper. . .

Maeve Kerrigan series by Jane Casey.  Maeve is an ambitious London detective who is overlooked and condescended to by her male colleagues – she’ll show them!  She also has a bad habit of running into serial killers.  Start with book 1, The Burning (2011).

Wintercombe by Pamela Belle (1988).  Set against the background of the English Civil War, this story describes how Silence St. Barbe tries to keep her family and her home, Wintercombe, safe while her husband is away fighting for Parliament.  This is one of my all-time top ten books and there are four books in the series.

Harry Bosch books by Michael Connelly.  My sister raved about Connelly’s books for years so I don’t know why it took me so long to start reading them.   Begin with Black Echo (1992) in which LAPD homicide detective Harry Bosch has to investigate a body in the drainpipe at Mulholland Dam – and it turns out to be someone he knew in Vietnam.

Flambards by K.M. Peyton (1967).  In the first of this four book series, orphaned Christina is forced to go live with her Uncle Russell, and his sons, Mark and Will, at their home, Flambards, 40 miles outside London in the countryside. Mark and his father are obsessed with horses while Will is obsessed with machinery and aviation. Christina, just 12, is an heiress but used to be shuttled from relative to relative, all indifferent to her wellbeing.

Armand Gamache/Three Pines. The discovery of a body brings Chief Inspector Armand Gamache and his colleagues from the Surete du Quebec to a small village in the Eastern Townships in Still Life by Louise Penny (2005).  I was on the fence about the first book but became captivated listening to the second book as I drove home from a vacation in Quebec with family.  Now I can’t wait for each new entry in the series!

Dear Mrs. Bird by AJ Pearce (2018).  As WWII breaks out, Emmy Lake longs to be a war correspondent but instead ends up assisting a difficult woman who manages a popular advice column.  What will happen when Emmy tries answering a few letters herself?  All four books in this series are delightful, which is rare.

Star Spangled Summer by Janet Lambert (1941).  When lonely Carrol Houghton accepts an invitation to visit Penny Parrish on a busy army base in Kansas, she has the best summer of her life and learns how to have fun and be part of a lively family.  In later books, Penny follows her dream of becoming an actress.  

I keep thinking of important, beloved series I did not mention – but I’m sure there will be another occasion.  Have you read any of these?