February 22, 2010
McNees lightly imagines the life of Louisa May Alcott, whose Little Women
has enjoyed generations-long success. The story begins with a 20-year-old Louisa unhappily moving with her family from Boston to Walpole, N.H., where her Transcendentalist philosopher father pursues a life sans material pleasure. Louisa, meanwhile, plans on saving enough money to return to Boston and pursue a career as a writer. Then she meets the handsome and charming Joseph Singer, who stirs up strong emotions in Louisa. Not wanting to admit that she is attracted to him, Louisa responds to Joseph with defensiveness and anger until, of course, she can no longer deny her feelings and becomes torn between her desires and her dreams. While certainly charming, the simply told, straightforward narrative reads like YA fiction. It'll do the trick as a pleasant diversion for readers with fond memories of Alcott's work, but the lack of gravity prevents it from becoming anything greater.
March 1, 2010
The title pretty much says it all about this first novel from McNees, an entry into the new subgenre that imagines the love life of spinster authoresses.
In her early 20s, Louisa moves to Walpole, N.H., for the summer with her financially strapped family: rigidly idealist father Bronson (portrayed with far more complexity in Geraldine Brooks's Pulitzer-winning March), loving mother Marmee and sisters Anna, Lizzie and May, all obviously recognizable as the models for the Little Women characters. While Marmee hovers over frail Lizzie and spoils immature May, Anna and Louisa get to know the young people of the town. Conventional Anna falls in love with Nicholas Sutton, a wealthy young man who clearly reciprocates her feelings. Louisa, who already has literary aspirations, tries to resist her attraction to Joseph Singer, whose father runs the local dry-goods store and whose younger sister becomes May's best friend. Louisa is as rude as possible to Joseph, but eventually his intelligence and sensitivity wear her down and the two share a kiss. But at a harvest dinner soon after, Mr. Sutton announces the engagement of Nicholas's younger sister Nora to Joseph, an arrangement made by the fathers. Unfortunately, Joseph's father is not only deathly ill but also on the brink of financial ruin, while heiress Nora requires a respectable fianc to rehabilitate her tarnished reputation. Louisa is crushed, but she and Joseph rendezvous and make love. Nicholas dies in an accident; Anna leaves home to become a teacher; the Alcotts leave Walpole; and Louisa heads to Boston. She is despondent over a lack of publishing success when Joseph shows up. They make plans to run away, but then she receives word that The Saturday Evening Gazette has accepted her story, and she stands Joseph up at the station. Years later, now a famous author, she returns to Walpole to see him once again.
Standard romantic pabulum, but Alcott fans will find interesting tidbits to savor.
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March 15, 2010
First-novelist McNees creates a previously unknown romantic affair for the author of Little Women. It took place, she imagines, in 1855 during the scantily documented summer the Alcotts spent in Walpole, New Hampshire. A handsome young merchant named Joseph Singer falls wildly in love with our Louisa, who is torn between reciprocal feelings for him and her passionate desire for personal independence and a career as a writer. The drama of the situation is compromised by a too-simplistic treatment of the characters and, of course, by the historical record, which shows that Alcott remained a self-styled spinster. Too, the infusion of issue-driven material involving womens rights lends a somewhat didactic air to a work that is, after all, romantic fiction. To her credit, McNees does a good job of re-creating the nineteenth-century milieu, and her readers will doubtless be inspired to read moreabout and byAlcott. Little Women, anyone?(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2010, American Library Association.)