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.

Book Review: Parson Austen's Daughter

Title: Parson Austen’s Daughter

Author: Helen Ashton

Publisher: Dodd Mead

Date: 1949

ISBN: none

Length: 336 pages

Quote: “Cassandra Austen was born in 1773, so that she was only in her third year when her sister Jane, a winter child, first blinked her bright eyes at the light, on the sixteenth of December, in the year 1775.”

This is a novelized biography of Jane Austen, 1775-1817, whose closest friend was probably her sister Cassandra, 1773-1845. All eight of Parson George Austen’s children seem to have been fairly close to each other. That is how we know much of what we know about their lives. They were widely separated in age and, after growing up, in physical space; so they wrote lots of newsy, chatty letters, which Ashton reworked into the details of this book. Though Jane and Cassandra were born less than three years apart their parents managed to squeeze a brother, Frank, in between them. Still, Jane and “Cassy” had something else in common: though they were popular girls, the young men they fancied (or those men’s parents) didn’t think they had enough money to be good prospects, so neither of them ever married.

While British society generally snubbed “old maids” and “poor relations,” and the Austen sisters were both, they seem to have found ways to enjoy being those things. Five of the six brothers married; the sisters evidently enjoyed being aunts. They had friends, went to parties and dances, though the older they got the more likely other people were to write that (both sisters, but Jane much more than Cassandra) seemed a little too pretty, witty, and bright to suit their opinions of how “old maids” and “poor relations” ought to behave. They lived mostly in charming country houses with lots of space for long walks, which both sisters enjoyed. They had all kinds of books to read. Jane started adding to the world’s supply of books at a very early age, but made her important contributions in her thirties.

Possibly because they walked so much, both sisters resisted infectious diseases for several years. Cassandra even achieved what was then considered old age. Jane barely made it into middle age before succumbing to some unknown infection.

Ashton finds hints of autobiography in Jane Austen’s romances…and something less endearing. I suspect it was not her fault. In the early twentieth century, when Ashton was learning to write, the fashionable thought was “We girls can do anything!” In the early 1940s it was actually fashionable for young women to have full-time jobs outside the home, and to think of their single-adult years as time for lots of other things, regardless of whether they ever married. Then in the late 1940s, as the soldiers came home, there was a push for women to give up their careers and choose to be housewives for the rest of their lives. I seriously doubt whether, in 1949, anyone would have published a book about Jane Austen that didn’t fit the prevailing line of propaganda: “Well, girls, if you’re very talented and don’t find anyone you want to marry, you could do worse than have lives like Jane Austen’s, that poor little thing. She was pretty and nice and popular and a Major Talent…and she died young…a-a-a-alllll aloooone” (usually this phrase would be uttered with some vibrato, as if dying alone were worse than dying, e.g., in a maternity ward with a half-dozen medical students peering at the cause of death). “And she was constantly alienating even her women friends,” (then stereotyped as unreliable, second-rate friends) “by being too witty and intelligent, you know. I’ve always felt that it was more feminine to laugh at a man’s jokes rather than make jokes.” The well documented result of which was that masses of talented, educated, promotable young women swallowed the whole line, tried being full-time housewives, and were bored out of their minds, and turned to drugs and became the stereotyped homeless seniors of the 1980s, or left their husbands and became the less conspicuous very poor seniors of that era...

Well…to be fair…I grew up among quite a few women who’d survived the late 1940s and 1950s. Most (not all) of them were related to me. And what they did was make a choice pop culture ignored: they ignored both of the stereotypes pop culture was pushing, They chose careers that were compatible with motherhood, worked, took time off when their children were actually babies who needed constant mothering or took the babies to work with them, and lived more or less happily ever after. Not that all of them were uniformly happy all the time. Some had serious illnesses; some were seriously scared by some eager-beaver doctor’s telling them they had serious illnesses when they didn’t. Despite modern hygiene and antibiotics, some of the husbands and children died. Sometimes they disagreed with their husbands. At least one couple did eventually divorce, in their sixties, so the disabled one could collect a pension while the healthy one continued to work. I saw some of them cry and heard some of them swear. Nevertheless they seemed much happier than any of the women who believed that they could have either paying jobs or marriage but not both.

Who knows how Jane Austen really felt about the course her life took. Feelings come and go, and the Austens’ whole generation had been taught that letters should be written when people had worked off their emotions and were thinking logically. Even in Austen’s novels emotions are expressed more in the details of “manners” than in the histrionic outbursts the next generation of writers loved to describe. Ashton would not have been allowed to publish a novel that presented Jane Austen as completely satisfied with the decision to forget the silly boys who’d passed briefly through her “friendzone” and enjoy being an aunt and a writer—and it would be hard to prove that she was, anyway, from her letters. (What her lettters do make clear was that both sisters were cheerful people who managed to find things to enjoy and to laugh about, even during sad times.) Today Ashton might have an equally hard time publishing a novel that suggested that Jane Austen cared how many people thought she ought to be sad and dull, or ever even wanted to marry any of her spineless suitors.

What we do know is that Jane Austen didn’t try to change her behavior…and encouraged a favorite niece who seemed to be growing up just like her, though the niece never became a famous author. If she could have known how much time she had, she might have said that her life could have been better than it was, but it could more easily have been worse.

Book Review: If I Were You

Title: If I Were You



(Original British title: Deception; the U.S. edition shows a silhouette of a girl's head, rather like the one below, colored in, with another silhouette showing behind it, to show that this is a story about doubles.)

Author: Joan Aiken

Date: 1987

Publisher: Doubleday

ISBN: 0-385023964-5

Length: 336 pages

Quote: “Certainly no longer than a year...At the end of such a period I must...be able to discover whether I have the necessary talents to pursue a literary career.”

Joan Aiken dedicated this piece of gentle fiction to “all female writers past and present.” Of all her dozens of novels, in some ways this is her best one. Never before and never since have introverts, and especially the kind who become female novelists, been so delightfully vindicated. Female writers should thank Aiken for such a gift.

In 1815 Alvey Clement, American orphan, and Louisa Winship, third of nine children in a rich English family, complete their education in an English boarding school where everyone has always guessed they must be twins. (They may be distant cousins.) Extrovert Louisa can’t bear the thought of settling down in her quiet country home, and urges Alvey to go home in her stead and use the opportunity to finish that novel Alvey has been wanting to write for all their teen years. Alvey reluctantly lets herself be tempted to use her education to tutor Louisa’s younger siblings (Aiken’s trademark pair of gifted children) and nurse Louisa’s elders, in a prettier place than she’s ever dreamed of finding, while Louisa, well, behaves like an extrovert. By the time they’re twenty-one the girls’ caper has a happier ending than it deserves.

Meanwhile...before there were nonfiction studies like The Introvert Advantage and Quiet, there was this novel, in which, one by one, Louisa’s family realize they enjoy Alvey’s company more than Louisa’s. In the 1980s it was balm for the much-abraded introvert soul.

Written without the fast-paced adventures and overt comic touches of Aiken’s earlier fiction, this mellow novel should appeal to those who like Jane Austen, Regency romances, or Victorian family stories. How is it possible for a double to replace a person in that person’s family of origin—even for a few months? It’s possible because each of the Winships has his or her own personal drama going on, such that most of them aren’t paying much attention to the others. Alvey, observing them as material for a novel, listens to them and brings some degree of comfort to each one.

What’s not to love? Well...some readers might mind that it’s not a romance. In the 1980s many female writers were tired of the cliché that every happy ending had to involve romance, and so, although If I Were You includes three weddings and an illicit affair, it contains no conversation that can really be called a love scene between a young couple, and ends with four attractive twenty-somethings still single. I find this refreshing; you might find it disappointing. Cynics might say that, like the unsatisfactory end of the budding romance in The Embroidered Sunset, the end of If I Were You amounted to promotion for a follow-up story. If so, the promotion failed and the follow-up story wasn’t written.

In any case, if you like gentle fiction and don’t already have If I Were You, run don’t walk.

To buy it here, send $5 per book, $5 per package (up to three more books of this size will fit into that package), and $1 per online payment to Boxholder, P.O. Box 322, or the e-mail address you get from salolianigodagewi, as explained in the Greeting post. Joan Aiken no longer needs the dollar she'd get if this were a Fair Trade Book; feel free to scroll down and find Fair Trade Books to add to the package.

Book Review: Midsummer Magic

A Fair Trade Book

Title: Midsummer Magic

Author: Catherine Coulter

Author's web site: https://www.catherinecoulter.com/

Date: 1987

Publisher: Penguin

ISBN: 0-451-40870-5

Length: 412 pages

Quote: “You are a randy goat, my lord!”

In the early 1980s, during the last major mass-media flap about the “pornographic” quality of some bestselling novels of the period, the late Art Buchwald observed that some of the same women screaming about the sex scenes in men's novels being “pornographic” were buying even more explicit novels—at the supermarket, from racks in between the housekeeping magazines and the Christian devotional books—as long as those books were (alleged to be) written by and about women.

He was absolutely right.

In the 1970s, some writers of fiction cutely insinuated that the relatively detached descriptions of How Babies Are Made in high school textbooks weren't satisfying teenagers' curiosity about how it felt. The answer is of course that each experience is unique, too personal to be explained in a textbook, but most couples enjoy the act of marriage.

Except, of course, when we're tired, and we have fifty other things on our minds, and we can't imagine how it's possible for our mates to find time to think about sex, but they do. So traditionally suburban housewives would buy these cheap “romance” novels that insanely, grotesquely exaggerated the thrills of sex and romance. Publishers had separate labels for different styles of novels; readers could recognize by the front cover whether to expect a chaste little story about teenagers learning how to make conversation and working up to asking for an official date, or a torrid tale of California divorcees flopping into bed first and deciding whether they liked each other enough to make a lunch date later.

A tiny bit less predictable were the bulky “historical” romances, often more anachronisms than history, where the level of societal oppression of women was one of the factors played against the fictional couple's passion to generate something in the way of a plot, but the story could still be summarized as: “Woman has sex, several times, different moods and methods, and likes it.”

And of course, if a woman picked up one of these books when she was not trying to nudge herself into a sexier mood than nature seemed to have intended, she recognized that it was stupid, melodramatic, hammy stuff. Sex is not a survival “need,” nor is it an addiction-like “thralldom.” Nobody has ever died from a lack of sexual pleasure. In fact people who make a firm decision not to do what might “feel so right” are likely to feel sexual pleasure after walking away. But weary wives wanted to read about fictional characters for whom desires felt like survival needs.

So here is an historical novel about Britain in the 1810s, when young people technically had some right to decide whether to marry each other or not, but their parents traditionally had the right to bully and manipulate them into marriages that suited the parents. Here's Frances Kilbracken, daughter of the Earl of Ruthven, who doesn't want to leave Ruthven to marry anybody, and Philip Hawksbury (Hawk to friends), son of the Earl of Rothermere, who doesn't want to give up his illicit relationship with Amalie the despised foreigner to marry anybody. Frances has two sisters who'd like to marry the next Earl of Rothermere. Both of them are pretty, but Frances decides to be on the safe side by making herself as unattractive as possible, even putting on thick spectacles that force her to squint around the glass. For Hawk's purposes, however, the least unwelcome choice is the unattractive, unfriendly wife who can be left to manage his country estate while he's in the city with Amalie...so he proposes to Frances, and if she says no because she wants to stay home with her father, her father makes clear, she'll have no home.

Amalie, a nicer girl than anybody in 1810 wanted to believe could exist, advises Hawk to drop her and try to seduce the wife his father has ordered him to “choose.” Gradually, while they settle a few family and business problems (the process includes a detailed close-up scene of “helping” horses breed), Hawk and Frances learn that it's possible to enjoy sex with each other.

And that's it. That's the story—if you call that a story. It's written for women, by a woman, with the intention of helping women fulfill a commitment they have voluntarily made, so it's not on the list of books the feminist neo-prudes have in mind when they rail against “pornography.” But it's nothing but pornography; Midsummer Magic serves no purpose other than to encourage readers to think about sex.

There are many levels of pornography that I'd rate “below” Midsummer Magic. Fifty Shades of Grey has more explicit bedroom scenes, and kinkier ones. Then there's the early twentieth century's “great, literary” porn, like Henry Miller's Tropic of Cancer and Tropic of Capricorn, where the author is saying something more than “Man had sex and liked it,” but the other things he's saying are morally worse than that. Then there's the sort of cheap male-oriented pornographic “novels” I've seen for sale but never actually read except as parodied in the novels and memoirs of Florence King, who used to write them and reminisced hilariously about bored writers writing lots of very short sentences and very short paragraphs to fill up more pages faster...

Well...I didn't buy this piece of porn; it does nothing whatsoever for me. Porn collections are very private things. Midsummer Magic came from another woman's stash, and may once have served some purpose for her. I don't mind reselling it to responsible adults who think it might serve some purpose for them. I don't believe in censorship. I know firsthand that a pornographic book or picture can be used to facilitate abstinence as well as indulgence, if it works for the individual reader, and I know that no real person has been physically injured by the printing of words on paper.

But I still say it's porn, and I'm not going to display it to the general public. If responsible adults want it, they can ask. I'm not going to insist that online readers verify their age to buy this book here; I am going to say that if adults choose not to allow their teenaged children to keep books that are all about what fun it is to do things teenagers don't have a legal right to do, the adults are right in banning this one from the house. So if you buy Midsummer Magic here, $5 per book, $5 per package (four books of this size to a package would leave room for four thinner paperbacks, all for the one $5 shipping charge) plus $1 per online payment...this web site will send $1 to Catherine Coulter or the charity of her choice, but if your mother throws the book away and won't let you drive for a month, this web site says she's right.