A Fan's Playground

Ever since I heard about the new Little Women movie that was coming out I was very excited about it, because it looked like it was going to do interesting things with the adaptation.

So I decided I needed to reread the book in preparation for going to see it, since it's been a few years since I've read it. I grew up on Little Women and its sequels and love them all dearly (in full recognition of their various imperfections), but my memory is not good and I wanted to be sure that I would be able to catch what the movie was doing with respect with its choices about what to maintain/alter/remove in its adaptation.

Little Women the book is a challenging one to make a movie of, because it's so long and so many things happen in it, without there really being a single overarching plot that it can be distilled down to because it's so episodic, and I think the movie made a lot of great choices in how to make that jump from page to screen.

The thing is. The thing is! I grew up with this book, right, so of course there are very specific things that I imprinted hard on emotionally, and a movie that interprets those things differently from me is never going to work 100% for me as a viewer.

Which honestly kind of disappoints me? Because like, a) a lot of ways the movie adapts the book are SO GOOD and I was delighted by these things, and b) the thing I'm maddest about is one that, in isolation, is a narrative choice that would very much make me happy if it was about different characters than the ones I grew up with.

OKAY let's get to the spoilers!

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Ah yes, very much in the usual style of Alcott's moralizing tales for young folks: ridiculous and kind of preachy, but also somehow charming.

It's a book about how poverty, modesty in dress, old-fashioned manners, hard work, and familial love are what you need to live a happy and fulfilling life, as shown by contrasting the main character Polly with her rich city friend Fanny and Fanny's family. The first part of the book takes place when Polly's about 14, and the remainder is Six Years Later when they're all adults.

I don't love this book as much as some of Alcott's others, but it's possible that's just because I was introduced to this one so much later. I grew up reading the Little Women trilogy, and Eight Cousins/Rose In Bloom, so there's a great deal of nostalgia factor in my love for those books, I think.

But it also seems to me the case that Polly, far more than the lead characters in these other books, is deliberately put forward as a model girl, which makes it harder to see and like her as just a person. And I don't understand Polly's interest in her designated love interest at all, which doesn't help me to feel happy with the conclusion of the book. (But then there are plenty of narrative choices in Alcott's other books that I also don't like, including some that I don't like a lot more than this (I AM STILL SO MAD ABOUT WHAT HAPPENS TO DAN IN JO'S BOYS), so who knows whence comes my lesser love for this book.)

My favourite part was the part where we meet all of Polly's female friends who also work for a living. Their close friendship and love and support for each other is great. Unfortunately this was just one short scene in the whole novel - definitely not an actual focus.