Reviews

Little Women by Louisa May Alcott

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goodbyeisabella's review against another edition

2.0

God where do I begin. I had high hopes for this book because I loved the 2019 movie so much but quickly upon reading, I realized that this was not gonna be on the same level. Maybe it’s just because of the language barrier between my modern day understanding of English and the way that people spoke in the 19th century but I find this book to be lacking so much of the life of the movie. Certain characters like Jo and Amy seem much flatter and none of their relationships are as deep or complex as I would’ve liked to see. This book claims to be about sisters and sisterhood, but in reality it’s just a compilation of moral lessons that Louisa May Alcott wanted to impress upon her young readers. This is the book’s biggest fault imo. I understand that this is a children’s book written in the 1860s so the moral is going to be heavy handed and its values are going to be outdated but goddamn was it insufferable. I was much more forgiving of this in Part One. I think because I liked the story more overall and the lessons they learn are rather harmless, objectively good lessons for children to learn. However, Part Two felt EXTREMELY preachy and the moral takeaways were genuinely infuriating. The plot by that point was also so much less charming and interesting. There were so many parts where I wanted to DNF this book but I kept going because I was already so far deep. That’s not to say that Part Two didn’t have good parts that I genuinely enjoyed because it did. I found

Beth’s death

to be even more moving in this book than in the movie and I actually sobbed while reading the scene at the beach. But so much of this book just fell flat. It truly seemed as though Louisa May Alcott included some bits just to teach the young readers a lesson and not because they were interesting or compelling in any way. And of course, the decision to

have Jo get married with children at the end is a controversial one that I can say did upset me personally. But it also wasn’t surprising considering just how much housekeeping and traditional gender roles are stressed to every character in this book.

Overall, I give this book a 2 star rating because I did enjoy Part One well enough and Part Two wasn’t completely bad but goddamn did I want to hit my head against the wall while reading this shit.