Byla to moc hezká kniha. Hodne pobavi,zlepsi naladu, pohodovy cteni. Urcite dodrucuji :-) ( )

Suzie Green, an eleven-year-old Seattle girl, was lonely and discontented. The girls at school were cliquish - banding together in Millicent's "Select Seven" club, with their secret code and snooty behavior - Suzie's mother, widowed in the second world war, had to work as a teacher; and there were no other kids in her immediate neighborhood. And then one day, sitting in her Lookout and gazing at the "Pink House" next door, Suzie saw something new and exciting: a moving van! An old family friend, the widower Bill Langdon, was returning to Seattle with his half-French daughter Clothilde - known as "Co Co" - and Suzie suddenly found herself with a best friend, and no time to be lonely!

This delightful book, the first in a trilogy of novels devoted to the adventures of Suzie and Co Co - Best Friends in Summer and Best Friends at School are the subsequent titles - is a pleasing little cream-puff of a story: lighthearted without being frivolous, and very much a product of its time, in that innocent 1950s way, without being completely irrelevant to the contemporary reader. I took the two main characters very much to heart, and enjoyed reading about their growing friendship, and their adventures in their neighborhood and at school. I loved the episode with the warring "codes" of speech, as Co Co's French faction face off against Milicent's numerically inclined Select Seven, only to find that the boys have also decided to adopt another language, in the form of Pig Latin!

Co Co's enthusiasm for all things American was rather refreshing (and again, very 1950s), and although I could have done without the (thankfully single) incident in which the girls play that they are being attacked by Indians, overall Best Friends is just a charming read! Readers interested in the world of children's literature, or just fans of the Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle books, will be interested to learn that Mary Bard is the sister of Betty MacDonald, the creator of those books. All in all, a book I would recommend to anyone with a taste for vintage girls' stories, particularly of the 50s period. I certainly intend to track down the latter two in the series! ( )