Daibhid's Journal

From our Librarything
Title: So Many Beginnings: A Little Women Remix
Author: Bethany C. Morrow
Publication: St Martin's Press (2021), 304 pages

Started: 2025-06-26 – Finished: 2025-07-02

This is a fascinating idea and absolutely delightfully executed. Little Women, but with the March family as recently freed African-Americans. It changes EVERYTHING about the book, of course, but the threads are still there to link the two. Meg, Jo, Beth and Amy and their love interests against a background of a place and perspective in history I was completely unaware of before now.

I found the tone both true to the time and easy to access, and the romantic storylines, in particular, much more satisfying than in the original Little Women. I was especially delighted by Beth, though also, of course, especially heartbroken, though the story as a whole is very light on gory details of atrocities; the emotional details are all there.

Five stars and I'll read any sequels.

I am not keeping up to date. It's partially that I'm often tired and partially that I'm still not writing about the thing that happened around Christmas that made things... more difficult... though ultimately it will turn out to have been better this way. But it's INCREDIBLY HOT and so we're running fans and using the pop-up pool in the garden and eating TONS of ice cream so it's also quite luxuriously holidayesque, while underneath is the horror of climate change. Yay?

In the last couple of weeks I may be regaining my ability to read again, which is intermittent, and I'm hoping to do monthly book posts again, I liked that the two or three times I did them.