The Little Women

Rating:
Summary: a great read from a wonderful author
Review: "The Little Women" is the third Katharine Weber book I've enjoyed, and quite possibly my favorite of the three. Eminently readable, the book explores the relationship between author, novel and reader in a uniquely engaging way. As readers, we are privy to the comments of two people (on whom characters are based) and the author about a novel in which all three appear - charmingly blurring the lines between observing and participating, between writing and reading, between the real and the imagined. Authors are often assumed to have written autobiographically - indeed, Jo in the original "Women" was thought patterned wholly on Louisa May Alcott. This book demonstrates at many levels how simplistic that assumption can be. Bravo!

Rating:
Summary: a great read from a wonderful author
Review: "The Little Women" is the third Katharine Weber book I've enjoyed, and quite possibly my favorite of the three. Eminently readable, the book explores the relationship between author, novel and reader in a uniquely engaging way. As readers, we are privy to the comments of two people (on whom characters are based) and the author about a novel in which all three appear - charmingly blurring the lines between observing and participating, between writing and reading, between the real and the imagined. Authors are often assumed to have written autobiographically - indeed, Jo in the original "Women" was thought patterned wholly on Louisa May Alcott. This book demonstrates at many levels how simplistic that assumption can be. Bravo!

Rating:
Summary: Not for every reader....
Review: A little too disjointed for my tastes, but still an amusing, thought-provoking read. Those who loved Alcott's books primarily for the style, rather than the story, will probably enjoy this one more than I did. I could definitely see assigning this in a high school literature class.

Rating:
Summary: A Fun and Thoughtful Read
Review: I loved "The Little Women." Now, I will confess up front: I also cherished the child's book "Little Women" by Louisa May Alcott, on which it is loosely based. However, you can enjoy this book without having read the Alcott version.

Meg (age 20), Jo (age 17) and Amy (age 15) Green are three lovely and accomplished young women who live on the upper West Side of New York in an enclave of liberal, educated privilege and wealth. Everyone wants to be the Green Family. Their father is a successful inventor, their mother is a beloved literature professor. Both parents set the highest ideals of family values for themselves and for their children.

Thus it comes as a great shock to the children when they find out that their mother has had an affair and their father has gotten over it. They can't. And so the children "divorce' their parents and move to New Haven where Meg is a junior at Yale.

The book is at once idealistic and incredibly realistic. On one hand, it seems very difficult to believe that these children would endure such hardship for more than a few days because of their adherence to their principals. On the other hand, their life in New Haven-complete with gritty descriptions of the public high school, the homeless situation, the rundown apartment-ring true. The reader comes to care very much about these three sisters and their roommate Teddy, an orphaned Yale student who serves as a reality check to these children so willing to give up two living parents.

The book's "narrator" is Jo--with "reader's notes" from Amy and Meg. This device bothered some reviewers. I actually liked it and it made me think more about the art of novel writing.

Now if you have read "Little Women" (the Alcott version), you can enjoy this book on another level. The author basically riffs off certain elements of the earlier one. Some of her riffs are extended--Teddy, the roommate, is clearly a substitute for the beloved neighbor "Laurie" in the original. Some of her riffs are only one or two notes-but on perfect pitch such as Jo dealing with a Lesbian pass being made at her. In addition, the "readers' notes" from Meg and Amy may make more sense--Alcott based her characters on her sisters and Meg and Amy fared the worst in her version.

I recommend this book highly for lovers of good literature everywhere--even if you haven't read the original!

Rating:
Summary: Hard to sympathize with snotty brats
Review: I wanted to like this book, but it's hard to enjoy when the whole concept just irritates you to no end. Blech. The sisters were snotty, pretentious, brats who were butting their noses in a place they didn't belong. I had no sympathy for them at all, I didn't care what happened to them. It's hard to enjoy a book wheen the whole time you're shouting at the characters to stop being babies and start acting like adults.

Rating:
Summary: what a find!
Review: I was skeptical about this book but the author has really succeeded. Like the new Karen Joy Fowler book that takes up Jane Austen, this is a novel that enhances a reader's knowledge of another text or texts, but that knowledge is not essential for enjoyment of the book. This is fun, clever but not too clever, and really a joy to read for those of us who loved feeling smart in English class.

Rating:
Summary: Charming Artifice
Review: I'm not going to go into the plot as most other people have. I just want to talk about style, which only some have done. The Reader's Notes and Author's Comments are indeed charming and as one reviewer said in these pages - it took a while to get the rhythm (every book has its own, this one has two) but once you do - you miss when things happen in the narrative and there are no notes. The other thing I loved is the sentence structure that at times mirrors actual sentences from Alcott. It shows the mastery of the author despite "Shlockbuster"'s comments. Glad to hear Weber teaches at Yale. Gives me hope for the future of novel writing.

Rating:
Summary: Provocative, smart, mordantly amusing...a mighty tasty read
Review: One of the more interesting novels I've read in the past period. Actually, I'm surprized Weber's book isn't getting more attention for its post-modern, writerly-conscious antics. At first I thought I'd hate those shennanigans but, truth to tell, they grew on me and I came to thoroughly enjoy this bifurcated, multi-conscious, novel.

That po-mo stuff aside, this is a fluidly readable novel that pulls in the reader with tenaciously fascinating hooks. Finest kind of reading. Save it for a good time, or read it right away.

Rating:
Summary: An interesting story told in an unusual way
Review: The three Green sisters who are the little women of Katharine Weber's title--Meg, Joanne, and Amy, who were indeed named after the characters of Louisa May Alcott's classic--have, like their literary counterparts, lived an insular life centered on their family. They have in fact constituted, they understand--together with their English professor mother and their inventor father--the perfect family, the sort of nuclear unit other families aspire to be, a self-contained quintet of tall, attractive, intelligent people who pepper their discourse with literary allusions and entertain themselves with ingenious made-up games. But when the girls discover that their mother has had an affair, and when their father refuses to join them in condemning her, the sisters become as disgusted with their family's imperfection, with their parents' failure to live up to the family's moral standards, as they had been convinced of its superiority. The younger Greens choose to divorce themselves from their parents, and they move out of their New York apartment to New Haven, where Meg is in her third year at Yale. Together the sisters face the logistical difficulties, unanticipated by them, of a life lived without parents.

Katharine Weber's The Little Women, which follows in broad strokes the plot laid down by Alcott's book, takes the form of an autobiographical novel written by middle sister Joanna and punctuated with disapproving notes penned by her sisters. Meg and Amy complain throughout about, alternately, Joanna's departures from the truth in her novelized portrayal of their exploits and her too intimate revelations about them. Their comments refer to events that occur outside the scope of the story Joanna tells, and thus supplement what we know about the Greens' lives while furthering our understanding of their characters.

Weber's novel tells an interesting story in an unusual way, and in sometimes very pleasing prose, such as this description of Joanna's initial response to the lobby of their New Haven apartment: "The small lobby was disappointingly dingy, and Joanna privately hoped its faintly urinaceous atmosphere had arrived with them as a lingering memento of their taxi ride and wasn't going to be an olfactory theme of their new lives." I do have some complaints with the book: Amy's tyrannical substitute teacher in her public high school in New Haven seems too cruel to be believed, and a scene in which the girls' roommate Teddy, acquired at the beginning of the school year, expresses a romantic interest in Joanna seems unprepared for. In the early part of the book the girls' dialogue sometimes struck me as unrealistic, but this fault may be attributable to the purported author of the book--Joanna, about whose lack of facility in writing her sisters regularly complain--rather than to Weber herself. It is noteworthy, at any rate, that my other complaints about the book were answered, in a sense, by the book itself: just as I was becoming annoyed at Joanna's over-long description of her family's perfection, for example, her sisters' scholia intruded to tell the author to cut it out. And while I found it difficult to sympathize with the Green sisters' overreaction to their parents' "faults"--sundering a happy home because they are unable to forgive their mother--I was not alone in my criticism of them: parentless, good guy Teddy was present to express his own impatience with the girls.

Well-written, and interesting for its unusual form, Weber's book also appeals--to me, at least--for its accurate depiction of Yale life and New Haven landmarks. Readers familiar with Weber's earlier work, too, will get a nice surprise in the appearance--in a sort of deus ex machina role--of photographer Harriet Rose, the protagonist of the author's first novel, Objects in Mirror Are Closer Than They Appear.

Debra Hamel -- book-blog reviews
Author of Trying Neaira: The True Story of a Courtesan's Scandalous Life in Ancient Greece

Rating:
Summary: A thoroughly modern take on a classic work of fiction
Review: The title of this novel caught my eye--how could I pass up a book called "The Little Women" when I was named after one of the sisters in Louisa May Alcott's classic? This modern story is a tale of three sisters, not four: Meg, Joanna, and Amy Green (given that Beth dies in the original tale, the Green parents wisely decided to skip over her). It is a book within a book, as the entire novel purports to be an "autobiographical novel" written by the middle sister, Joanna (of course!). Nothing sums up this novel better than this captivating first line: "This is the story of the year we left our mother and our father in order to live on our own, away from their bad behavior and their infuriating pretense that they were the most splendid parents in all the world."

To expand a bit, the three Green sisters are living a perfect life with their perfect parents in modern-day New York City--until one day, they accidentally encounter evidence of their mother's affair. When they confront their parents, they are told that the affair is over and done with, a "private matter," and they are expected to carry on as if nothing ever happened. Unable to do this, the girls make a life-changing decision: 17 year old Joanna and 15 year old Amy would move to New Haven, CT, to live with Meg, 20 years old and about to enter her junior year at Yale. What follows is the story of their efforts to survive as a new family to replace the one they lost. Fans of the original Little Women will be happy to discover that the similarities to the March sisters are clearly not in name only; in addition to Joanna being a writer and Amy being an artist, other parallels to the March family frequently appear, sometimes subtle, sometimes major.

A particularly unique aspect of this novel is that Joanna, author of the book within the book, has struck a deal with her sisters allowing them to include "reader's notes" as part of the manuscript. These notes--comments from Meg and Amy on the text--are interspersed throughout the book and are accompanied by Joanna's replies, or "author's notes." While sometimes distracting, they add an interesting, real element, making the book within the book device more plausible. This highly original work is both homage to a literary classic and an important piece of work in its on right.