I'm building classes where I know the types of the attributes, but Python of course doesn't. While it's un-pythonic to want to tell it, supposing I do want to, is there an idiomatic way to do so?

Why: I'm reading in serialised data (without type information) involving objects-nested-inside-objects. It's easy to put it into nested dictionaries, but I want it in objects of my class-types, to get the right behaviours as well as the data. For instance: suppose my class Book has an attribute isbn which I will fill with an ISBNumber object. My serialised data gives me the isbn as a string; I would like to be able to look at Book and say "That field should be filled by ISBNumber(theString)."

Bonus glee for me if the solution can be applied to classes I get from someone else without editing their code.