Little women

 Sweetie and I finally finished listening to this one in the car. The group reading on Libbra Vox was great.it had a lot of their best readers including Elizabeth Klett and Karen savage.

The book was originally published in two parts, and the two parts are so different from each other that they should be reviewed separately.

Notes on Little women:

It's great. Louisa May Alcott creates characters who are distinct and believable, And situations that evoke childhood. There is a strong moral center to the book, but it does not feel preachy because Alcott relies on showing rather than telling. Although the protagonists are women, the childhood setting was so universal that I had no issue relating to it. It felt like The logical book to read after the little house series or Anne of Green Gables.

Notes on good wives:

The original publication of Little women ended with the excellent Christmas party chapter. The sequel, good wives, picks up three years later. As the title implies, these chapters are about incipient womanhood. The topic was less interesting to me than the childhood-Oriented chapters of the first half. On the other hand, the Beth storyline is justly famous, and the newlywed chapters were insightful. I also enjoyed the resolution of the character arcs in the last chapter. All in all, it kept my interest up enough to want to finish the book, but I'm not at all interested in reading the signals.