Title:
Author(s): Lauren Baratz-Logsted
Genre:  Young Adult, Historical Gender-bent, Romance
Publisher/Year: Houghton Mifflin Books/2010
-Webpage: Official Page
-Blog: BiblioBuffet  or Teen Fiction Café
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Synopsis: When Will and Bet were four, tragic circumstances brought them to the same house, to be raised by a wealthy gentleman as brother and sister. Now sixteen, they’ve both enjoyed a privileged upbringing thus far. But not all is well in their household. Because she’s a girl, Bet’s world is contained within the walls of their grand home, her education limited to the rudiments of reading, writing, arithmetic, and sewing. Will’s world is much larger. He is allowed—forced, in his case—to go to school. Neither is happy.

So Bet comes up with a plan and persuades Will to give it a try: They’ll switch places. She’ll go to school as Will. Will can live as he chooses. But once Bet gets to school, she soon realizes living as a boy is going to be much more difficult than she imagined.

Review:  I'm of two minds over The Education of Bet.  On the one hand, this had all the makings of a historical novel I love.  Feisty heroine, madcap adventures, romance, family secrets and its set somewhere in the 1800's.  However, maybe due to the slim nature of the volume the story didn't feel complete.  By the time the ending chapters occur I felt as if the author rushed to a conclusion too abruptly.

The story is very much like Shakespeare's Twelfth Night (of which Bet grows to love) or maybe more accurately the Amanda Bynes' movie from about half a decade ago She's the Man (in which Bynes dresses like her twin brother, and attends school in his place, all while he's off having some sort of musical epiphany).  Actually that's an apt description; much of what happens to Viola in the movie (it is a direct update of Twelfth Night) is mirrored in The Education of Bet.  That's not a bad thing!  Amanda Bynes in general, and She's the Man in specific, entertains me a lot.  It just made me feel like dejavu.

What works best for this novel is when Bet is struggling to be more 'boy' like, but ending up being even less so.  To that point Bet lived a very sheltered life, having never left the estate since her and Will had moved in with their Uncle.  All her knowledge of what boys are like come from Will, his stories and her books.  She doesn't understand why there is so much social posturing, bullying, arguing and a sort of defeatism.  While this makes sense, it also marks her as being very very naive.  There's no doubt that at the all-girl schools similiar, if less hands-on and violent, things happen between the students.  Just whereas boys will use their fists first, girls use their words.  Bet never had that experience however, being the bastard daughter of a maid.  She often will question things that happen or things that her room-mate, James, acts as if are ordinary.

The characters over all are shallow feeling, with very little depth given to the vast majority of them.  Bet longs for an education and to go to school, but we're never shown exactly why (for the freedom of it?  Just because she wants to?  The author implies several different reasons, but doesn't seek to expand on them).  Similiarly Will longs to join the military, but has such a romantisized view of it that it made me wonder at if he was at all intelligent.  James is quiet, and feared and likes to keep a low profile--but until the end we aren't told very much of his backstory.  I'm still wondering why the other students kept a wide berth from him (just because he was so weird?). 

There is also a certain amount of uneveness to the narrative.  For the first fifty pages Bet goes back and forth with memories and stories she was told of her family before moving in with Gardner.  Once she's at the school, other than infrequent letters to Will, its almost exclusively dedicated to the present.  This makes the news Bet receives seem like it come out of no where.  Truly when she said "I hadn't thought about it" (that's the paraphrase, if I put the quote in it would be a spoiler) in a surprised manner I believed her.  I certainly hadn't thought about it.  The scattered clues leading to the revealation were just there in the story.

Though this is a critical review, I did enjoy the novel.  Bet's interactions with Will and later James are amusing, as is her commentary on what its like to be a boy.  Just reading about her trying to keep all the lies straight is entertaining.  Unfortunately it suffers from being entirely too short.  192 pages was clearly not enough time for Baratz-Logsted to flesh out this story suitably. 

And a minor pet peeve: the exact year this is set is never said or shown.  Nor are there any clues as to when it is!  While I don't think knowing whether it was set in 1804 or 1876 is critical to the plot, it would have at least kept me from trying to figure it out.