The American Girls Collection
For children 7 and up.
Working with historians and curators at the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation, Valerie Tripp has added the story of “Felicity: An American Girl” to Pleasant Company’s historical series on American girls.
The first nine books, published in 1986, drew enthusiastic response for their sympathetic and realistic rendering of spunky and individualistic American girls living in different parts of the country and in different eras.
In addition to fine, rapid narrative, each book was graced with historical, documentary photographs adding context and verisimilitude. Truly, any youngster swept up by the fine tales of Kirsten, a pioneer girl, or Samantha, a Victorian orphan, or Molly, a child of World War II, would come away from the reading with a heightened awareness of her own historical antecedents and her place in the present as well.
The three new Felicity books focus on the year 1774, in which year Felicity adventures bravely with a spirited horse, learns colonial manners and etiquette (as does the reader), and in a tale geared for Christmas, faces a difficult moral choice.
In the appended paintings and photos, we become familiar with the basic 18th century accouterments–samples to sew, horn books to read from in school, costumes, dolls, and the dramatic panorama of a fox hunt.
The writing itself lucid-not dumbed down- offers a mature vocabulary, as well as sentences of some complexity. This linguistic maturity is an important asset-something you want to be alert for in children’s books. Watching television only, children become passive and unresponsive. Sentences, words, images flow up and over them; they cannot be recalled. In reading, the child almost literally grapples with a text. And as any wrestler knows, grappling brings both endurance and strength-neither one a characteristic of the sixty second sound bite.
These Pleasant Company books–all of them–are not only an engaging way to learn history and a seductive way to encourage your child to read. They’re fine stories in their own right.
Peter Neumeyer is a professor of English at San Diego State University and highly recognized in the field of children’s literature. He is the author, editor, or translator of 10 books and over 100 articles. His articles and reviews appear regularly in Mother and Parents’ Choice. In 1994, he published The Annotated Charlotte’s Web, and he is currently assembling his second collection of poetry.
