I usually am able to find something that I like about just about every Little Women retelling that I’ve read. Unfortunately, this doesn’t seem to be the case when it comes to Little Women retellings that take the story and situate it as part of the romance genre.
This is not to say that I don’t like romance, because I do. A quarter of the books I read last year were romance novels, and I’m on track for that to be the same this year. I love romance. Contemporary romance is my favorite, but I have a soft spot for a cowboy romance.
I recently read Leave it to the March Sisters by Annie Sereno and it reminded me that I’d never finished the blog post that I started writing about a duology of books by Virginia Kantz, Meg & Jo and Beth & Amy that I read last year. So here I am tackling these romances together and thinking about what gets lost when Little Women becomes a romance.
Meg & Jo
Starting with the first book in Kantz’s duology, Meg & Jo, there were, of course, lots of changes to the expectation of a Little Women tale. The first and foremost being that the characters were all aged up. YA retellings like So Many Beginnings and Great or Nothing, also age up the characters, but mainly to just slightly older than they are in the first part of Little Women and similar to their ages in the second part of the book. Kantz ages up her characters to their late-20s/early-30s which is just a very different place in life.
Meg & Jo makes a few choices with Meg and Jo’s relationships that I don’t love. While Meg struggles in the early days of her marriage in Little Women, Kantz leans into this and Meg’s plotline is largely reduced to an unsatisfying marriage where she is taking on the full responsibility of domestic tasks and child rearing with little support from her husband. Often I feel like Meg gets the shaft in storylines in retellings, and I was disappointed to feel like this one just solely stifles Meg. It also doesn’t seem to understand her relationship with John Brooke and takes away any of the balance that exists in their marriage in the source material.
Jo’s romance blooms with Bhaer only after she gets pregnant with his baby. Did I mention that Chef Bhaer is her boss at the time that she gets pregnant. This fact basically ties her down in a relationship after several miscommunications, rather than allowing her to come to choose Bhaer by her own volition.
Beth & AMy
If I thought Meg & Jo was unhinged, Beth & Amy upped the ante.
Please ignore the slight incoherence of the following very strong reaction: AMY AND LAURIE JUST??? GET ENGAGED?? WITHOUT EVER HAVING DATED FOR LONGER THAN A WEEK WITHOUT BREAKING UP??
It feels like Kantz really just wanted to end everything the same way it ends up in Little Women (despite diverging from much of the source material) so really rushes the Amy and Laurie relationship and engagement. The two characters fully establish a relationship and rather than this feeling like growth for their characters, it feels like a really immature move for two characters who, in this retelling, really feel immature already anyways.
I also didn’t love much about Beth’s storyline. Beth didn’t die in this book, which means that the author has to make up an entire personality for adult Beth based on what we get of child Beth in Little Women. And while that can probably be done successfully – Kantz doesn’t accomplish that. Beth suffers from an eating disorder and has a whole plotline where she dates a famous singer. The most egregious thing with Beth was just a line where the singer mentions something about “faking it till you make it” and he’s talking about confidence on stage and she thinks he’s realized she’s faking orgasms when they have sex. There is some reasonable connection from Alcott’s Little Women to Beth having an eating disorder (something we discussed in my Alcott class), but other than that, I wish more writers weren’t afraid to just kill Beth and write through that grief.
One thing that carried across Meg & Jo and Beth & Amy was that there was too much Mr. March. I maintain that no one cares about Mr. March – he’s literally the least important character in Little Women This may be false, it may be that I just don’t care about Mr. March. He and Abby (Marmee in this set of books) are having marital difficulties in these books which makes for a decent portion of the story, and it makes Mr. March more of a character than he needs to ever be in my opinion.
Leave it to the March Sisters
Sereno’s Leave it to the March Sisters isn’t about the March sisters at all, rather, it follows primarily Amy Marsden, English professor and aspiring painter, whose mother loved Little Women and thus named her daughters Jo and Amy. Somewhat unwittingly, Amy ends up moving in with her childhood friend and former crush Theo Sinclair, who her mother always likened to Laurie. Unfortunately, both Jo and Amy have fallen out with Theo for different reasons, but Amy grows determined to bring them back together.
I’ll get my small pet peeve out of the way first which is that the author just ignored the way academia works. Having spent three years working in the front-office of the English Department at my alma mater, I may be more aware of this than your average reader, but it wouldn’t have been that hard to make a few changes to the descriptions of Amy’s job and work. It also wouldn’t have changed the story. The one thing I did find interesting and enjoy about this book was that both Amy and Jo had an interest in literature rather than limiting that to Jo.
Unfortunately, I found many of the situations in this romance to be absurd, the side characters to lack substance, and the true cause of the riffs between Amy, Theo, and Jo to seem silly compared to the amount of tension the author had them cause. I also had to read 320 pages to get to the least satisfying two-paragraph sex scene I’ve ever read in a book that was somehow overwritten despite it’s short length. This could have been a fun contemporary romance and I might have overlooked more of its faults if not for the connection to Little Women.
Can and Should Little Women Be Rewritten as Romance?
Little Women has romance in it. Meg and John Brooke, Jo and Bhear, Amy and Laurie (or Jo and Laurie depending on who you ask). But Little Women isn’t about romance. Little Women is about sisterhood, coming of age through grief, family, and more. Romance novels, especially contemporary romance, relies on a certain formula in order to get characters to a happily ever after in around 350 pages.
I think that Little Women suffers when forced to fit into this formula because inevitably numerous important elements have to be left behind. Leave it to the March Sisters omits Meg and Beth completely. Meg & Jo and Beth & Amy is able to accomplish a bit more since Kantz wrote two books instead of one and had a higher page count to work with, but rather than using that space to write more deeply about sisterhood, chooses to write Abby (Marmee in these books) as a point-of-view character in Beth & Amy fully disrupting the idea that this book is about the sisters.
This is not to say I don’t think that Little Women couldn’t be successfully re-written as a romance, I just don’t think it’s been done yet. I would love to see Little Women tackled perhaps as a period romance, leaving it in it’s civil-war/reconstruction era setting. I think that there is space to draw romance out since Alcott does less with romance than she does with sisterhood. I also think writers shouldn’t be afraid of just letting Beth die and writing characters who find and rely upon romance in that grief. I would love a well-written Amy/Laurie romance for that reason in particular. At the end of the day though, I think my favorite Little Women retellings will continue to be those that focus less on romance and instead explore Alcott’s characters in new and unique settings and situations while fundamentally understanding what makes the characters tick and what makes readers continue to come back to this story.
Bookishly Bright 