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I'm a little torn about this book. Brooks' prose was undeniably beautiful—she has a real gift for elegant, exact descriptive prose, and I could certainly have read a much longer book by her without any qualms. The broadening of scope she gave to Little Women was impressive; yet I thought some of the aspects and angles Brooks chose to pursue jarred uneasily with the original work. The Marmee she writes here, while a vibrant character, was certainly not a woman I recognised from all the times I had read Little Woman when I was younger. Alcott's family of Marches may have been too good to be true at times, but I think Brooks over-corrected here at points. I'm really not sure where the vegan thing came from either—surely I remember them eating sausages at one point, though my memory might well be faulty in that respect. It was the way the book dealt with race, gender and the intersections with the two that troubled me, though. The African-American characters never seemed to make their way beyond the point of stereotype, and the most prominent of them all, Grace, could hardly have been less discomfiting to me. Some of the dialogue that was put into her mouth, particularly in one scene towards the end... ugh, the non-white characters should not all be there to provide Learning Moments for the white ones.