Honey Bunch: Her First Visit to the City is one of the Honey Bunch books I was given in 1964. I hadn't reread it since 1984, but I think I like it better now than I did when I was nine, just four years older than Honey Bunch. Perhaps that's because the humor is written to amuse adults as well as children.

Honey Bunch is going visiting for the first time and it's to New York City. There she and her mother will stay at the apartment where her father's sister, Aunt Julia, lives with her husband, Paul Turner, and their almost nine year-old twins, Bobby and Tess.

It's January 4th and Mr. Morton's 33rd birthday when the story opens. Honey Bunch doesn't mean to, but she misplaces her father's bakery-made cake. Luckily, it's undamaged when it's found.

Then Honey Bunch and her mother take the train. There's an obnoxious little boy on the train who won't mind his mother and is rude to the sweet little girl. I rather enjoyed the punishment he brought on himself.

Honey Bunch has so much fun with her relatives and seeing the city. She manages to get lost a few of times, but there's always some kind adult to help her.

By unhappy coincidence that bully from the train, Lester Morris, lives in the same apartment house as the Turners. He's rude or mean to Honey Bunch whenever they meet. He goes to the same matinee, 'Gold Heart,' that Honey Bunch and her cousins are taken to see. He's in the same dancing class as the twins and comes to the party.
When Honey Bunch is lost at Central Park and finds the monkey house, there's Lester teasing the monkeys. He tries to scare her with lies. I love what one of the monkeys did to Lester. (No, this is 1923 and a good, clean book for little girls. The monkey didn't fling anything.)

Ms. Lawrence, who wrote the first 16 books in the series, according to this site http://readseries.com/joslaw/joslaw-1c.htm (and Wikipedia), was very good at describing things a child might want to know about a place. For a 21st century adult, there's the interest and charm to be found in descriptions of the way the comfortably well-off lived back then, not to mention the sights Honey Bunch is taken to see. I was interested to learn that Honey Bunch wore leggings when she was allowed to go out and play in the snow. I had to wear dresses to school until 1971 when I was growing up in Maryland, but we girls were allowed to wear pants under our dresses when it was very cold.

Did you know that New Yorkers had called their trolley cars 'surface cars'? I've seen traffic cops with whistles or signs in old cartoons. They're a novelty to Honey Bunch. She thinks of her first bus as a fat automobile. I don't know what kind of work Uncle Paul did, but his 21st floor office is a large room with a big window in it. He must have a good salary, though, because the Turners have a nice apartment and a maid.

There is an African-American character, Dorry the elevator boy for the apartment house where the Turners and Morrises live. The N-word is not used. Dorry is described as 'colored,' though. His speech is mostly grammatical, peppered with 'you-all' (even used in the singular -- my daddy told me only a yankee would do that). Dorry is polite, efficient, and industrious. More than that, he takes no guff from that nasty little bully, Lester. Loved what Dorry did when Lester threw a snowball at him!

It's no wonder that everyone (aside from Lester) is nice to Honey Bunch. She's a nice, thoughful, and well-behaved child -- but not sickeningly sweet. Her innocent misunderstandings make me smile.

If you're looking for thrills and chills, better look elsewhere. If you like children's series from the early decades of the 20th century, give Honey Bunch a try.

I'm not sure what printing my copy is. The boards are red and the lettering that seems a dark blue in the shade looks more like the deep green blue of a peacock feather when held up to the sunlight. The frontispiece is printed on glossy paper. (The caption doesn't bother which woman behind Honey Bunch is which. However, her daddy is shown with dark hair in the book about her first little garden, so the dark-haired lady in what is either a fur-trimmed or fur coat is probably Aunt Julia.) The pictorial end papers were drawn by Marie Schubert, who took over the cover art with book 13, according to this site: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Honey_Bunch . According to this site, the early thick editions had cover art pasted on: http://www.seriesbooks.com/cart/catalog.aspx?cid=178 . I have only one pasted-on cover in the series and it has the same Schubert endpapers design.

The sun is shining and there's a stone wall. It probably encloses the water the takes up the bottom third of the double-page spread. There's a swan swimming and toy boat with a skull and crossbones at the top of its sail. A dark-haired boy in a sailor suit sits on the wall on the left. His shoes are just above the water. He's fishing. His can of worms and a cute little spotted dog with a ribbon around its neck are to the boy's right.

From the center and all across the right half of the picture are three girls and another little boy. The girl who is half on the left and half on the right is a blonde. She kneeling on the wall and pointing down at something. Her dress is striped with white collar and cuffs. Her curles are mostly hidden by a beret. A pretty girl with long ringlets that are probably brown -- the ink is blue -- sits demurely on the wall with her hands clasped under her knees. Her plain dress has a long sash. There's a second little boy, a blond, slightly crouched between girls two and three. His visible hand rests on the wall. He appears to be wearing a one-piece checked playsuit. The last girl is a brunette in a polka-dot dress with a dark middy collar and a very large bow to her sash. She's kneeling on the wall.

These are very pretty children. The reader might be pardoned for thinking they're all wearing mascara and lipstick. In fact, back in 1964 when I was too young to know that pixie cuts and playsuits with shorts weren't worn by little girls in the 1920s, I thought the blond was another blonde.

Of the ads in the back, 22 Honey Bunch books are listed, ending with Her First Twin Playmates. (Her First Trip in an Airplane is still listed as Her First Trip in an Aeroplane.) Only five Maida books are listed so each one has a two or three-line description. The latest one is Maida's Little Camp. The last book of the 19 Mary Jane books list is Mary Jane's Friends in Holland. There are 32 Bobbsey Twins books, so they're listed in two columns. The last is At Indian Hollow.

The last ad is for Fairy Tales. They're listed in alphabetical order by title, but I'm grouping those by the same author/collector together : Mulock's Adventures of a Brownie and , The Little Lame Prince ; Anderson's Fairy Tales, MacDonald's At the Back of the North Wind, The Princess and Curdie, and The Princess and the Goblin ; Lang's blue and red fairy books, Jacobs' English Fairy Tales , Browne's Granny's Wonderful Chair , Grimm's Fairy Tales , Yei Theadora Ozaki's Japanese Fairy Tales, Collodi's Pinocchio , and Kingsley's The Water Babies. ( )