Round One, A Handful of A Levels Bracket

Your Consolation Man. "Hey Girl, I know you were passionate about the homocidal twins in Sun and Candlelight but you'll always have me."

First, the results from the Barfing on His Brogues Bracket. Not a ton of surprises (Caroline's Waterloo crushed The Bachelor's Wedding which was the only clean sweep) but I did have to break a tie between Emma's Wedding and Britannia All at Sea (choosing BAaS because, though I didn't LOVE it, I found it more memorable than EW).

Sister Peters in Amsterdam
The Fateful Bargain
Blow Hot, Blow Cold
An Old-fashioned Girl
Britannia All at Sea
Magic in Vienna
Dearest Love
Dearest Eulalia
When May Follows
The Girl With Green Eyes
Making Sure of Sarah
The Vicar's Daughter
Heidleberg Wedding
An Ordinary Girl
Caroline's Waterloo
Hannah
The Final Touch

And now we charge onto the A Handful of A Levels Bracket! I want to remind all the Betties that they should feel free to jump into the voting whenever they want and to vote wherever they feel they can.

Everyone did a marvelous job of putting their votes in an easily digestable form: Votes first, comments last. I thank you greatly!

Here is the link to the Book Review Archive for Betties, like me, who need a refresher on some of the titles. Voting will close next Monday.

Vote away!

Round One, The Barfing on His Brogues Bracket

Welcome to the main event Betties! Today marks the first day of voting in our Epic Quest to find The One, True Betty. Competition will be heated (but civil) and voting will close next Monday when I post the winners of this round and choose another bracket to vote on.

Again, here are our loose guidelines: Vote with any criteria you want but only vote once--either on the FB page or here in the comments. When voting, you should lead the comment with your votes so that it should (pretty please) look like this:

"Caroline's Waterloo
The Fortunes of Franscesca
The Little Dragon

I chose these books because I like donkeys and because I find 'dragon' an adorable nickname..."

and not this:

Caroline's Waterloo seems better than An Independent Woman but I'm not super sure so I just went with it. TFoF is just a fun name but then, so was the book it was going up against ('Polly')...

As always, feel free to lobby for your favorites as that is a huge part of the fun and you're welcome to lobby loud and long before casting your own votes.

Here's a link to the Uncrushable Jersey Dress reviews if anyone needs a bit of a refresher on plots. And please, please don't feel you can't vote if you haven't read everything. You're welcome to vote or not vote on any of the match-ups.

The last rule is that we have fun with this! Betties, I introduce you to The Barfing on His Brogues Bracket.

Vote away!

March Madness Redux

We add a picture of a hot man to each one of these because we will soon need some soothing.
Go in peace, Betties.

Yes. We are doing this. Hopefully, I have sorted myself out a little better than the last time we attempted to figure out which Betty Book reigns supreme.

For one thing, I am using a spreadsheet which should help and I've broken The Canon into four brackets for ease of voting:

The Barfing on His Brogues Bracket

The Handful of A Levels Bracket

The Hocked Locket Bracket

The Imperiled Poppets Bracket

First, I want to make sure that everyone can access these brackets and in a few days we'll start voting on just one of them. I'm not planning on moving at too harried a pace (I'll put a new bracket up on Monday and close voting on the following Monday). I expect I'll post a link to our reviews page so that people can get a refresher if some of the titles are lost to the mists of your memory.

Your criteria for voting is up each individual Betty and I expect a lot of lobbying and persuasion to happen in the comments section here and, more probably, on the Facebook page. When you vote your comment should look like this, in that you post your winners:

Caroline's Waterloo

A Small Slice of Summer

Never the Time and the Place

etc., etc.

Comments about why you chose what you chose can go at the end. It's easier for me to sort out the votes when they're alone and clean-looking.

Remember, the first round should be pretty painless--I've tried to match books written from different eras--but it only gets harder as the days go on.

Let me know in these comments if it's complicated or something needs explaining or revising. Again, this post is not for VOTING on. We're giving a head's up and asking for feedback.

I'm excited to do this!