Our latest book has been Little Women by Louisa May Alcott, and my feelings are very complicated about this one. This novel is quite old, released in 1868, but it is extremely beloved to this day. On whichever website you visit you will find many glowing reviews from people who’ve read it both as adults and adolescents and everything indicates that it has withstood the test of time. It’s so beloved that it makes me scared to even write my own opinion because I really… didn’t like the book at all.
The novel revolves around the March sisters and their lives as they go from teenagers to adults, each one with their own personality and troubles, with each sister reaching adulthood in their own way. At least that’s the idea, but I personally felt that a lot of their individuality was crushed by their mother’s incessant moral lessons about what a good and virtuous woman should be. As I was reading I kept trying to keep the age of the book in mind but large parts were just way to preachy. The abundance of moral lessons honestly took away all the intrigue of the plot; as soon as any of the sisters did anything even remotely “bad” they were instantly “set straight” by their mother, apologized, and then that was pretty much it. Rinse and repeat for 47 chapters.
This book made me feel bad for being so bored; I kept wondering if I was an immature reader or that I didn’t have the attention span for “serious” books. But it’s so slow. The book reads like a slow diary spanning around 10 years, and I kept wondering when the plot was going to pick up, at around chapter 25, I resigned myself to the fact that it probably never would. I’m being harsh but that was my genuine reading experience. I know that the intention of the book isn’t to be particularly suspenseful, seeing as it’s more of a slice-of-life novel, but I felt so distant from every character that I couldn’t bring myself to care about their journeys.
Even though I didn’t like the book, I will say that it’s not poorly written. Alcott definitely knows how to write, I just don’t care much for the actual content. One of the things that bothers me is that I can’t completely figure out her intentions in writing the book in the first place. Is it meant to be an empowering and raw glimpse of women’s lives, or is it a handbook on how to become a good wife, where the moral of the story is that you need to become one? Maybe I’m missing the point and am trying to put her in an unfair box. I just can’t shake how depressed I felt reading the book, aside from my boredom.
If I had to pick something out as particularly interesting, it would probably be the second sister, Jo’s journey as a writer. You could definitely tell that the poor treatment she received from various editors was inspired by Alcott’s own life and writing career. It was interesting to see the reality of female writers at the time, but I really disliked the way that people (particularly one character) shamed her for what she wrote when she was making sensational stories for a paper to earn money. At that point, Jo was a grown woman and did not deserve to be lectured like a child for earning a living, something that wasn’t always easy for women at the time.
I’m giving the book 1.5 out of 5 stars, because I know it’s not poor literature. Even though I know that the book was written in a different time, when a book attempts to lecture me as much as this one did, it becomes very difficult to keep a neutral opinion.
By: Elvira Svensson