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A review by thetomatowriter
A Marble Woman: Unknown Thrillers of Louisa May Alcott by Madeleine B. Stern, Louisa May Alcott
4.0
There are a lot of reviews of these stories (not on goodreads but in general) that will basically say "This will TOTALLY CHANGE how you view Louisa May Alcott!" or "It's so different from Little Women!" But really, I wasn't much surprised by this book. Yes, Little Women is a warmer story and it's kind of a sapfest (I say that with love, because it's one of my favorite books and Jo March is forever one of my favorite characters), but IN Little Women, it talks about the thrillers that Jo wrote to get by when she was starting out as an author. Alcott confirmed multiple times that Jo is basically a fictionalized version of herself. These stories, then, are basically those thrillers that Jo wrote. You can imagine it so clearly, Jo up at three in the morning writing the scene of Cecil and Germain sailing through a storm, or Sybil attempting to break out of an insane asylum.
However, if you do have some gentle, moral and somewhat prudish mental image of Louisa May Alcott then I would definitely recommend this book to shake you out of that. There are dark themes throughout every story: manipulation, mental illness, drug use (and not subtext. The premise of A Perilous Play is literally that a bunch of twenty-somethings decide to get high to stave off the boredom, so clearly nothing's changed xD), etc. They're all artfully written, though, and interesting, yes, even thrilling reads, if the endings are sometimes a bit too pleasant for the path taken through most of the story. And even if you DON'T idealize Alcott but want to read something of hers that's not about the March family, this would be my first suggestion.
However, if you do have some gentle, moral and somewhat prudish mental image of Louisa May Alcott then I would definitely recommend this book to shake you out of that. There are dark themes throughout every story: manipulation, mental illness, drug use (and not subtext. The premise of A Perilous Play is literally that a bunch of twenty-somethings decide to get high to stave off the boredom, so clearly nothing's changed xD), etc. They're all artfully written, though, and interesting, yes, even thrilling reads, if the endings are sometimes a bit too pleasant for the path taken through most of the story. And even if you DON'T idealize Alcott but want to read something of hers that's not about the March family, this would be my first suggestion.