Book #3

The Little Women Letters by Gabrielle Donnelly
368 pages

The Little Women Letters has been on my to-read list for around 3 years. It finally came up next on my list, and was happy to not have to put it on hold at the library, and was able to find it on the shelf.

Now, I was a Little Women fan as a child. I owned a very nice copy of the book (I may still have it somewhere at my parents' house) and everyone loves Christan Bale as Laurie! One of my best memories of Little Women is rereading it for my children's literature class I took in college. I loved that class (did you know you could get an A+ in college? It was the only class I got that grade in, and it looks kind of strange on a college transcript ...), and I really enjoyed rereading some of my favorite childhood classics.

In this book, we are asked to imagine that Jo's great-great granddaughters are living in London in modern times. We are then asked to imagine that somehow in their mother's attic is a whole bunch of letters written from their great-great grandmother, Jo March, to various sisters throughout her life. This really bothered me. Who kept all these letters? It'd be a different story if the letters were all written to Jo and she had kept them to pass on. But somehow all the letters to different people ended up in the same box in an attic? This fact really bothered me throughout the novel and is still bothering me now.

Anyway, the letters are book ends to situations in the modern-day women's lives. They are all obviously supposed to represent one of the March sisters -- Emma is Meg March, the responsible and sensible one, living her life in a normal, average, "the way you're supposed to" fashion; Sophie is Amy March, with a flair for the dramatics (both onstage and in her own life) and also takes a Beth-like turn for the worse in a medical scare; and Lulu is Jo March, the one who walks to the beat of her own drum.

The result is a little ... boring. And while the original Little Women is not known for its action-packed drama, I just felt like this book was just a little dry and slow for my tastes. Also, it jumped around a lot, from character to character to the point where I was confused a few times.

The highlight of this book were the actual letters written by Jo March, which were written in Louisa May Alcott's exact voice that it was hard to believe Gabrielle Donnelly wrote them. Definitely props for that.

At any rate, it's always nice to check off a long-time contender on my to-read list!

Next up: Adulting by Kelly Williams Brown