Book Review: Josefina Learns a Lesson

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.