Gabrielle Donnelly
Simon & Schuster, 2011
As a life-long lover of Little Women, there was no way I could pass this one up. Emma, Sophie and Lulu Atwater are the great-great-granddaughters of Jo March. Yes, that Jo March - the one who cut her hair and had all sorts of scrapes and misadventures, declined Laurie's proposal and ended up marrying a German professor named Bhaer. See what I mean? There is no not-reading this one!
Lulu is the middle sister, flanked by elder sister Emma who has everything smoothly under control and is planning her wedding, and little sister Sophie who is energetically pursuing her creative career on the stage. Lulu is...well, she's not sure what she's doing or where she's going. A brilliant academic, she has no desire to continue following science - people-skills are not necessarily her forte - and the idea of trying to find a 'real' job is just too, too much. Lulu's 'escape' is cooking. And then, she stumbles across a stash of old letters - Grandma Jo's letters, to be exact. In the words shared between sisters, generations ago, Lulu finds a kindred spirit, and starts discovering things about herself - and what family, sisterhood, means.
The Little Women Letters is a good read. A solid read. Poignant, real, familiar. The characters, especially Lulu, are easy to relate to - I'm pretty sure I've had some of the exact same thoughts as Lulu. This is what I would consider a 'genuine' novel: you could swap out the characters with real people, and it'd be a believable story (well, if it were possible to truly be related to a fictional character - but you catch my drift). I thoroughly enjoyed it, and now dearly want to revisit Little Women.
Book provided by my local library.
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