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shadda 's review for:
Little Women
by Louisa May Alcott
The first half of book is almost unbearably sweet. The later chapters, after the girls have grown up a bit are better, but there's still a lot of moralizing and resolution making. Jo's discourses on literary life and the various characters' relationships to art are probably the most interesting thing in the novel because Alcott treats these things realistically. All of the girls are talented, and both Jo and Amy make money from their creations, but none of them are artistic geniuses and ultimately they all become content with making art part of their lives, rather than the ultimate expressions of them.
One thing that quickly became apparent is that the characters in this book have a far different definition of "poverty" than I do. The Marches rent their house and must work outside the home, but run no risk of starving or freezing to death in the winter. They can afford to engage in artistic pursuits, buy medicine and pay the doctor when one of the family falls sick, give their girls expensive wedding trousseaux, and have a live-in housekeeper. To my mind, they are middle class, not poor. That doesn't stop the girls from talking constantly about their poverty, or how they're happy to marry poor man (with whom they can carry on an equally middle-class lifestyle) as long as they love him. Instead of seeming noble, these proclamations just make the girls seem spoiled, which is appropriate at the beginning of the book but is rather off-putting when they've supposedly reached adulthood and outgrown such things.
Ultimately, I think it's worth reading, but wish the author had written the first half of the book in the same style as the second, or even omitted the first half altogether. With its diverse yet underdeveloped female characters and its tidy morals at the end of each chapter, the first half of the novel is a bit too reminiscent of children's cartoons for my taste.
One thing that quickly became apparent is that the characters in this book have a far different definition of "poverty" than I do. The Marches rent their house and must work outside the home, but run no risk of starving or freezing to death in the winter. They can afford to engage in artistic pursuits, buy medicine and pay the doctor when one of the family falls sick, give their girls expensive wedding trousseaux, and have a live-in housekeeper. To my mind, they are middle class, not poor. That doesn't stop the girls from talking constantly about their poverty, or how they're happy to marry poor man (with whom they can carry on an equally middle-class lifestyle) as long as they love him. Instead of seeming noble, these proclamations just make the girls seem spoiled, which is appropriate at the beginning of the book but is rather off-putting when they've supposedly reached adulthood and outgrown such things.
Ultimately, I think it's worth reading, but wish the author had written the first half of the book in the same style as the second, or even omitted the first half altogether. With its diverse yet underdeveloped female characters and its tidy morals at the end of each chapter, the first half of the novel is a bit too reminiscent of children's cartoons for my taste.