Title: Josefina Learns a Lesson
Author:
Valerie Tripp
Date: 1997
Publisher:
Pleasant Company
ISBN:
1-56247-517-7
Length: 70
pages
Illustrations:
full-color paintings by Jean-Paul Tibbles
Quote: “Tía
Dolores is always at work. She’s always tyring to fix things and improve things
and change things—especially us!”
The
motherless Montoya girls aren’t sure how they feel about the aunt who moves in
to look after them. Tía Dolores wants them not only to keep up their sewing and
weaving, and all the farm chores that might have been assigned to their
brothers if they’d had brothers, but to learn to read and write as well. Should
loyal children even want to be able
to do things their parents couldn’t do?
In the United
States, around this time in history, Abraham Lincoln’s father’s answer to that
question was no. And he was not an extraordinarily envious, mean man; in old
Europe the feudal system had thrived on a belief that God had prepared people
to occupy their proper hereditary places in society, that if the lower working
class learned to read they wouldn’t want to do their jobs any more and society
would collapse into rampant greed. However, this being a Pleasant fiction, the suspense is finding out how Dolores will
guide the rest of the family over to the pro-literacy position. You know no
storybook in this series was going to concede even one character to the
anti-literacy position.
The
“American Girls” historical fiction series sold well for a long time. They’re
all very nice stories written to give children a mental picture of how children
lived, worked, and learned in different historical periods. Not based on any
actual family stories, the plots are arranged in a nice orderly sequence: each
girl learns a lesson, goes to school, celebrates a birthday. Josefina lives in
Santa Fe, still a Spanish colony in 1815; the United States is still a foreign
and faraway country for her.
If you like
Josefina you’ll like the other American Girls. They’re all very nice children,
smart, brave, resilient, goodhearted, free from any early stirrings of
adolescent rebellion or preadolescent cliquishness; they’re planned to appeal
to parents and teachers everywhere. The perhaps surprising thing is that they
appeal to child readers too. There’s no realism about these stories but there
is solid historical research, beautifully detailed illustration, and competent
storytelling; as “chapter books” for grades two through six, depending on the
individual child’s reading skills, they’re well done. The books were designed
to be marketed together with dolls, and the child-shaped fashion dolls sold
well; if they’d only been built on a scale of two inches to one foot, which is
kid-craft-friendly, rather than three, which becomes bulky, they might have
been the next Barbie collection.
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