Reviews

Karen E. Eifler

Porter, Connie. Happy Birthday Addy! and Addy Saves the Day. Middleton, Wisc.: Pleasant Company, 1994. Illustrated by Bradford Brown.

“Bringing history alive for you” is the hope expressed in every introduction of the new American Girls Pastimes materials; that hope is definitely realized in these activity books. Cookbooks, paper doll sets, craft books, and theater kits have been ambitiously conceived, solidly researched, and artfully rendered for each American Girl era in Pleasant Company’s collection.

Readers have become acquainted with heroines Felicity of colonial Virginia, Kirsten of the Great Plains, Samantha of the Victorian era, and Molly of the World War II home front since their first appearances in The American Girls Collection in 1985.  Addy, an African-American girl growing up during the Civil War and its aftermath, is the most recent addition.  The historical novels are lively and notable for their strong heroines who demonstrate bravery, spunk, humor, and intelligence.

While intriguing historical facts richly contextualize each story—for instance, Addy is forced by the plantation overseer to eat the green worms she overlooked while cleaning off tobacco leaves—each girl also wrestles with issues close to the hearts of pre-adolescent readers: friendship, jealousies, and tensions with parents and siblings.  Satisfying resolutions evolve.  Addy’s creator, Connie Porter, does not patronize her readers by “dumbing down” her vocabulary either.  Brown’s vivid side-bar renderings of unfamiliar words are helpful, as are the instructive illustrations of crucial scenes.  This history is not sanitized for a young audience.  The atrocities of enslavement, rigors of Underground Railroad escapes, and the hardships and disillusionments of freedom are graphically present in both Porter’s fictional accounts and the “Peek into the Past” provided at the end of every story.

Happy Birthday Addy! and  Addy Saves the Day provide readers with insight into the monumental, heart-searing challenges newly free African Americans undertook to reunite families ripped apart by enslavement in the South.  Both books are set in Philadelphia where Addy learns that “Momma, Poppa and I and all the colored people got a strange kind of freedom. . . . There are jobs we can’t get, shops we can’t eat at just because of the color of our skin. It ain’t fair.”  The author offers no magical solutions here.  Rather, the strength of the family’s bonds sustain it through the difficulty of re-creating their post-slavery lives. While these stories are ostensibly written for girls, boys will probably value their action and gritty truth.  Teachers will find the Addy series an excellent resource for supplementing any textbook account of the era.  The primary sources in the “Peek into the Past” sections are first rate and accessible to a variety of reading levels.

Teachers and parents will also do well to add the American Girls Pastimes Collection to their arsenals of resources for combating kids’ notion that history is a dry collection of names and dates.  Kirsten’s Cookbook, for example, provides simple recipes for fruit soup and ginger cookies which typify the humble fare and honor the cultural tastes of the pioneers of the Great Plains.  Samantha’s Cookbook guides its readers (and their adult helpers) through the intricacies of a Victorian tea.  Photographs and drawings abound, as do tasty bits of history, such as the frugal use of every portion of a butchered hog and the eleven pieces of cutlery necessary for a proper Victorian Sunday breakfast.  For later eras, there are examples of advertising and packaging which are both amusing and instructive about how commercialized, in comparison, food preparation is today.  Anyone following the recipe for making butter in a jar will have an appreciation for the tastiness of the real thing and the amount of time women spent “merely” putting food on their families’ tables.  Most of the recipes and crafts are adaptable to classroom settings, calling for readily available materials and ingredients.  The tastes and artifacts young people produce as a result of the engaging, accessible materials which comprise The American Girls Pastimes Collection will, just as the contributors hope, bring history alive.