Little Women Book

Sisters Meg, Jo and Amy have the perfect family—loving, creative parents; a comfortable life on Manhattan's Upper West Side; a future full of possibility. Perfect until the daughters discover their mother has had affair, and, even worse, that their father has forgiven her. Shattered by their parents' failure to live up to the moral standards and values of the family, the two younger sisters leave New York and move to Meg's apartment in New Haven, where Meg is a junior at Yale. It is here that the girls will form their own family, divorced from their parents. The Little Women is a chronicle of that year, wittily narrated as a novel written by the middle sister Jo and commented upon throughout by her sisters.

If at times The Little Women is as sentimental as its model -- the character of the roommate, Teddy Bell, seems to have sprung from the same adolescent fantasy as Alcott's Laurie -- on the whole, the novel earns its right to sentiment by being both unusually good-natured and well written. Novels with spurious critical apparatus don't often wear it lightly, but Weber's use of the form is both easy and playful, and her seamless integration of a metafictional narrative with skillful old-fashioned storytelling is intellectually and aesthetically satisfying. — Emily Barton