I mostly listened to this book (and 1/3 of Good Wives) through the free Librivox.org dramatic reading. But I did read a few chapters alongside the dramatic reading and a few chapters on my own. I loved the dramatic reading. The woman who read "Jo" and the narrator was a really great reader, and besides the guy who read for Laurie, whose voice is a bit nasal for my liking, all the primary character actors--those reading Beth, Amy, Meg, Marmee, Hannah, and the father--were pretty good and believable (for a free recording by non-professional readers; had I paid for this and been told it was a dramatic reading, I'd ask for my money back).
Quick summary: Sometimes feeling more like a short story collection, this episodic novel follows the lives of four sisters, their parents, and their live-in nanny, told largely through the perspective of the 2nd-youngest's, Josephine (only once or twice in the text), more commonly "Jo." The larger story arc is that the father is off to war while his daughters go about the business of growing up with the help of their mother, Hannah their servant who seems more like a matronly aunt or unassuming grandmother. A neighbor boy, Laurence, "Laurie," hangs out quite a bit and becomes fellow-friends with the tomboy Jo. The father, away at war, gets injured and is on the edge of death, so the mother goes to him to nurse him back to health; meanwhile, the eldest, Meg, meets (and eventually falls in love with and marries) Laurie's tutor, Mr. Brooks. Beth contracts a serious illness (typhoid?) and is bed-ridden by the time Laurie sneaks and calls her mother back (Hannah forbade the four girls to send for the mother, fearing Marmee would think Hannah couldn't take care of things while she was away). All the while, Jo is writing short stories, working up the courage to submit them to someone other than her family, submitting stories, and finally getting paid large sums of money to write for newspapers. The father recovers; Beth recovers. Meg gets engaged. Everyone's happy. The curtain closes on the little women in the living room, lounging, not fashionably, but comfortably, on the settees and sofas in their drab family home, reveling in the afterglow of all good things.
From what I can tell of the next book, which I accidentally "read" as I drove back from Kentucky, Meg gets married and has twins, Beth dies, Laurie goes off to college, and Jo pursues her writing career.
LMA is as funny and witty as ever, and while I know most of the time this is considered to be more of a children's book, I found it to be incredibly compelling to listen to and engage with. Her sense of characterization is unparalleled. I really feel like I know the three older girls, especially Jo, and I get a strong sense of the way Jo sees her parents and Hannah. She does this by shifting the POV throughout, giving us third-person omniscient chapters that follow Meg or Beth instead of through Jo -- who likely doesn't actually tell any more of the story than the others do... I don't know: I listened to most of this, so the woman narrating the story was the same woman who voice-acted the part of "Jo," implying that the narrator is Jo, and, on my first reading, I'd say I pretty much agree. We get the overall impression that Jo is telling this story, even when we're inside Meg's mind, for example. It might also have something to do with Jo's (a)vocation: writing. We get the feeling that this is just another of Jo's stories that she passes around to her family/captive audience--that as readers we've come a "little woman."
In terms of genre, I've already had difficulty choosing a side between episodic and composite novel, but the text also accepts labels like diary/journal in some places, correspondence in others. The narrator of the text dubs it a "domestic drama." It's intertextual, not just in that it references other texts popular during the CW, like Warner's Wide, Wide World, Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin, and Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress, but also in that there are chapters where the four girls literally reenact scenes from Pilgrim's Progress, and understanding some of the irony of Alcott's stories requires an understanding of the Civil War, sentimental/domestic fiction, the romance genre so popular at the time, novels of manners. I find it fascinating that years after the war ended, LMA decides to set her "children's story" inside a civil war. A bildungsroman for little women with a multigenre platform that screams, "why choose when you can have it all?" And in the end, they really do have it all: they're all together, happy, reminiscing on romantic pasts and bright futures, faces wreathed in sunlight, eyes and hearts glowing with love for one another.
I don't know if LMA put the ironic fly in the ointment of this idyllic ending or if that's my own cynical transference, but I have a hard time reading it without cringing a little at the picturesque quality of its perfection. Everyone does what they're supposed to do -- according to God and country -- and all ends well. (I realize it's not the case when you tack on Good Wives, but this is where Alcott ends the story, and so my analysis ends here to retain the distinction between the two.)
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