Modern reassessments of the books acknowledge the importance of her innovations but have become much more critical of the didactic elements of her work. Kathleen Hardee Arsenaut concludes that Lenski's "determined view that good character and loving families will invariably overcome social prejudice and economic injustice strikes the modern reader as naive and simplistic," and that her insistence on happy endings through "hopefulness, kindness and self-control" undermined her effectiveness as a purveyor of social realism and at times, as in the case of her work to publicize the conditions faced by migrant workers, an activist.