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A review by toggle_fow
Jo & Laurie by Margaret Stohl, Melissa de la Cruz
emotional
hopeful
reflective
medium-paced
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? Yes
- Diverse cast of characters? No
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
3.5
Well, there seems to be a heated ship war going on in the reviews. I'm glad to see we've all done our part to preserve this celebrated 150-year-old tradition.
Honestly, it's really funny to think of girls in Civil War times harassing Louisa May Alcott about Jo and Laurie, and us in the present day still carrying on the Discourseᵀᴹ.
Anyway, this book takes the first half of Little Women as a given (with some alterations), and then deviates from there. I have always found the ouroboros of LMA writing Jo writing about her family, and presumably Jo-written-by-Jo also writes about her family and so on, to be a little hard to fathom. It gets further muddied in this book, as here Jo is already an authoress and doesn't go write in New York, but instead writes about herself going to write in New York.
Is this book as powerful a lightning rod to the soul as the original? Of course not. It's not even as powerful as the 2019 movie.
Does it do a passable homage? Yes. I would say it's at the "very good fanfiction" level.
The first part of this book is pretty delightful. The sisterly dynamics are good, and the classic, priceless Jo-and-Laurie dynamic is even better. Their holiday in New York is pretty fun too.
The last half does flounder a little. I thought Amy's narrow escape was a little too derivative, and the Double Sulks is fine, but we already know the story of the Double Sulks. An excellent fanfiction would have made you know, feel for and love Lady Harriet just as much as any canon character, and handled her story as well. Here, she just barely rises above the level of cardboard cutout. An excellent fanfiction would have also used this opportunity to discover things we never knew before about John Brooke and the March parents and possibly Laurie's past.
But this isn't my dream 200k Little Women ao3 rewrite, it's called Jo and Laurie and it's not even 400 pages, so that's fine. And this does a good job at leaning hard into all the most charming Jo-and-Laurie things that were sad to see pass away the same way that it's sad to see childhood go, even if you know you wouldn't want it to stay forever. It's just... it's JUST that I, who loves the Jo-and-Laurie dynamic, was not totally convinced.
I wanted to see the dynamic evolve into something that showed me they would actually be good together long-term, and that Jo herself was wrong. I thoroughly enjoyed the book and am willing to turn a blind eye long enough to be happy to read this wish-fulfillment, but. We didn't get to see enough of any dynamic when they were finally reunited, and it just needed more. More time, more interactions, more fleshed out post-proposal, everything.
Honestly, it's really funny to think of girls in Civil War times harassing Louisa May Alcott about Jo and Laurie, and us in the present day still carrying on the Discourseᵀᴹ.
Anyway, this book takes the first half of Little Women as a given (with some alterations), and then deviates from there. I have always found the ouroboros of LMA writing Jo writing about her family, and presumably Jo-written-by-Jo also writes about her family and so on, to be a little hard to fathom. It gets further muddied in this book, as here Jo is already an authoress and doesn't go write in New York, but instead writes about herself going to write in New York.
Is this book as powerful a lightning rod to the soul as the original? Of course not. It's not even as powerful as the 2019 movie.
Does it do a passable homage? Yes. I would say it's at the "very good fanfiction" level.
The first part of this book is pretty delightful. The sisterly dynamics are good, and the classic, priceless Jo-and-Laurie dynamic is even better. Their holiday in New York is pretty fun too.
The last half does flounder a little. I thought Amy's narrow escape was a little too derivative, and the Double Sulks is fine, but we already know the story of the Double Sulks. An excellent fanfiction would have made you know, feel for and love Lady Harriet just as much as any canon character, and handled her story as well. Here, she just barely rises above the level of cardboard cutout. An excellent fanfiction would have also used this opportunity to discover things we never knew before about John Brooke and the March parents and possibly Laurie's past.
But this isn't my dream 200k Little Women ao3 rewrite, it's called Jo and Laurie and it's not even 400 pages, so that's fine. And this does a good job at leaning hard into all the most charming Jo-and-Laurie things that were sad to see pass away the same way that it's sad to see childhood go, even if you know you wouldn't want it to stay forever. It's just... it's JUST that I, who loves the Jo-and-Laurie dynamic, was not totally convinced.
I wanted to see the dynamic evolve into something that showed me they would actually be good together long-term, and that Jo herself was wrong. I thoroughly enjoyed the book and am willing to turn a blind eye long enough to be happy to read this wish-fulfillment, but. We didn't get to see enough of any dynamic when they were finally reunited, and it just needed more. More time, more interactions, more fleshed out post-proposal, everything.