Final Thoughts on the Girl Scouts Series

I just finished reading the last book in the series. I read through this series rather rapidly, which indicates that I thoroughly enjoyed it. I cannot recall exactly what prompted me to begin building my set of books three years ago. I must have read somewhere that the series was good, or perhaps the first one or two books sort of fell into my hands. What I do recall is that after I had a just a few of the Girl Scouts books in my possession, I was able to purchase the complete set of three Mary Louise Gay books, also written by Lavell. I read the Mary Lou books and loved them, so I decided to try much harder to complete the set of Girl Scouts books. I knew that if I liked the Mary Lou books that I would also like Lavell's other books. Now if I could just get that one Linda Carlton book that I need . . .

The Girl Scouts series spans nine years of Marjorie Wilkinson's life. During the first book, she is a freshman in high school. The last book ends at the beginning of fall, slightly more than one year after Marjorie's college graduation. Near the end of the last book, Marjorie's age is given as 23.

The end of the series was planned ahead of time. I will not spoil what happens, but the series has a definite end to it. All the loose ends are tied up, and we can expect Marjorie to live happily ever after.

The first few books in the series are a bit slow paced, but volumes five through ten are paced about the same as most series books. As far as I know, the Girls Scouts series books were the first books written by Edith Lavell, and her ability as a writer improved as she wrote additional titles. The first four books are good to very good, and the last six books are excellent.

As I read the last few books in the series, I began to wonder how much of the books are autobiographical. Edith Lavell was a Girl Scouts Director in Philadelphia, and in the last book, Marjorie is an Assistant Girl Scouts Director somewhere in the general area of Philadelphia. I wonder how many of the petty, jealous people who appear in the last book were based on people Lavell knew. I wonder whether Ruth Henry was based on someone Lavell knew. I wonder whether Marjorie's personality was anything like Lavell's or whether Lavell based Marjorie on someone she admired.

Something that stood out about these books is that they contain a large number of typos. There are many cases in which the leading letter is missing from a word, and many cases of letters transposed within words. In one of my previous posts on this series, I commented that a sentence in a passage that I quoted was worded rather oddly. On page 168 of The Girl Scouts' Director, "intimacy" is spelled as "intamacy," so there are even spelling errors. I did not keep count of all of the mistakes, but I do believe that I saw more mistakes in these books than I ever have in a juvenile series.

On one of my dust jackets, the book's title is crooked on the spine! Also, these books have cheap dust jackets that have nothing printed on the front and back flaps. None of the books have a table of contents! I always love looking at the table of contents as I read a book just to get a hint of what might happen later. I missed it very much with these books. From the crooked title to the spelling errors to the missing table of contents, I get the idea that the A. L. Burt Company must have been very slipshod during the 1920s. The A. L. Burt books from the 1930s seem to be of higher quality than these books.

I have created the Girl Scouts series section of my website:

http://www.series-books.com/edithlavell/girlscouts.html

I created a book and dust jacket gallery to show all of the variations that I have:

http://www.series-books.com/edithlavell/coverart.html

On the above page, I mention the yellow spine dust jackets from the 1930s. On the front flap of the one dust jacket that I have, I noticed that only volumes 3, 4, 5, and 6 are listed. I am thinking that possibly only volumes 3, 4, 5, and 6 were reprinted during the 1930s. This may in part explain why volume 3 seems to be the easiest to find title. Volume 1 seems to be about as difficult to find as the last few volumes. It may be that the middle volumes in this series did go through the most printings.

If anybody wonders why I often do not show the spines of the dust jackets in my dust jacket galleries, it is because the spines of my dust jackets have serious problems. I always edit out the flaws in dust jackets before posting them to my site, unless the flaws are too significant. Usually, it is not worth my time to try to edit out the flaws in the spines as the flaws typically consist of heavy soiling and significant chipping to the lettering on the spines. As you will no doubt notice from my Lavell Girl Scouts dust jacket gallery, even the front panels of my dust jackets have serious problems. Some of them are faded, and two of them are have moderate chipping.

In closing, I highly recommend the Girl Scouts series by Edith Lavell. I knew that I would enjoy the books, but I found that I enjoyed them even more than I had originally expected. I enjoyed the books so much that I have the same feeling that I had after I read the Betty Gordon books. It is sort of a let down feeling, and it will be hard to get into another series.