Little Women Review by Emma

            
Recently, I read the novel Little Women by Louisa May Alcott. The story follows four sisters named Meg, Jo, Beth, and Amy as they grew up, learn about life, and find love in Civil War-era America. (A note about how the book is structured: most older printings of the book are split into two volumes, with the first entitled Little Women and the second, which picks up essentially where the first part leaves off, entitled Good Wives. In general, when I discuss the book here, I’m referring to both sections.)

The book opens with all four sisters together, discussing how they’ll celebrate Christmas with their father away in the Civil War and without much money. As the scene unfolds, we begin to learn about each character’s personalities, motivation, and hopes: Meg, the oldest, wishes to become a proper, refined domestic woman; Jo, the next oldest, is a free-spirited, hot-tempered writer; Beth is shy and sweet, and spends most of her time at home, and Amy, the youngest, is somewhat spoiled and wishes for expensive things. The first portion of the story follows the sisters as they each encounter problems as simple as throwing a failed dinner party and as serious as scarlet fever, and learn how to overcome them, often after receiving advice from their wise mother. Throughout these chapters, the readers get to watch the characters grow and mature, and often receive lessons about life from the book’s narrator parallel to those the characters are learning. The book spans a total of almost fifteen years, and sticks with the sisters as they become adults, travel the world, fall in and out of love, and settle down.

Overall, I really enjoyed this book. Specifically, I thought one way the author really succeeded was in creating four distinct, interesting main characters and telling a story spanning a large portion of their lifetimes that still felt consistent with their personalities. I think that these characters are by far the best-executed aspect of the story in that all four sisters are fairly different, but each individual is three-dimensional, their interactions feel natural, and their trajectories throughout the story make sense with what we know about them while still leaving some breathing room for them to mature and grow as people. Little Women definitely focuses more on exploring these characters’ journeys throughout the book than on any single cohesive plotline, but I think that, in this case, it’s a choice that works really well. In addition, I think that the tone of the book works really well to support the story it tells. The book comes across as pleasantly old-fashioned sounding, and favors long, wandering sentences with almost made-up-sounding words. That being said, the humor, emotional moments, and reflections on life in general that the book offers are still fresh and engaging, and despite its lack of a traditional action-oriented or adventure-style plot, the story never feels boring.

Overall, I would say that Little Women has good reason for being a classic book, and I would recommend this book to anyone searching for a slower-paced, more character-based novel.