Adelita By: Tomie DePaola Reflection from Casey Brock

The author of the book, Adelita, draws upon the Cinderella story in an imanginary fairytale set in Mexico. Soon after Adelita was born Adela dies, leaving Adelita's father to care for the newborn with the help of their faithful housekeeper, Esperanza. Adelita's father marries a very mean lady with two children and later dies. The story continues with Adelita being raised by her hateful stepmother and her two mean stepsisters who make her do dirty housework and treat her as their maid by getting rid of Esperanza since she is no longer needed. Esperanza secretly returns and gets Adelita prepared for a big fiesta. At the fiesta, Adelita catches the eye of Javier, a handsome prince, then she disappears at midnight. The story continues as Javier searches for the beautiful Adelita who disappered from his fiesta.
Sounds just like the American version of Cinderella doesn't it? DePaola does a fantastic job of rewriting the Cinderella fairytale into a Mexican setting. Throughout the text, spanish words and phrases are used followed by the english translation. This book is a great multicultural book and could be used all throughout the classroom. You could use this book for Social Studies when learning about different cultures, such as the Hispanic culture. You could use this book to compare and contrast different literature and versions of the Cinderella story during reading time. You could also use this book to teach students a foreign language by teaching them the different words associated with Cinderella. This would be a great book to use if you have a Hispanic child in your classroom that speaks English as a second language. You could have the Hispanic student help teach a lesson by letting the student teach his or her classmates the spanish words. You could have this student help read aloud the story so that he will feel more accepted into the classroom by you, the teacher, showing that you care about their culture. This also allows the class to get an appreication of the diversity of different cultures in their environment.