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A review by life_full_ofbooks
Meg and Jo by Virginia Kantra
1.0
This book proves that you shouldn’t fix what isn’t broken. Little Women is my favorite classic novel. I have read the book multiple times and I have seen every version of the movie. When I saw there was a modern retelling as a book I jumped in excitement.
This book failed on so many levels. As the title depicts we only get Meg & Jo’s stories. Meg is 2 dimensional at best. It seemed like author was trying too hard to portray Meg as she was from the original but she comes across as much weaker than her 1800’s counterpart. Jo has always been my favorite character. Out of all 4 sisters she’s the one I’ve always wanted to be, but not this version of her. It felt like certain things were happening because the author wanted them to, not because of Jo’s actions. Abby (aka Momma, or Marmee to us traditionalists) is stubborn and I didn’t see any of the qualities in her that I loved from the original, and the author’s portrayal of Dr. March was an absolute joke. The best character in this book is Jo’s boss but even he is missing the qualities that Fritz had in the original book.
I get that this book is based on the original but there are enough scenes from the original book recreated for the modern day that I just expected the characters to live up to the ones I hold so dearly in my heart. I was so excited to read the sequel Beth & Amy but after this I think I’ll skip it and just read the original again.
This book failed on so many levels. As the title depicts we only get Meg & Jo’s stories. Meg is 2 dimensional at best. It seemed like author was trying too hard to portray Meg as she was from the original but she comes across as much weaker than her 1800’s counterpart. Jo has always been my favorite character. Out of all 4 sisters she’s the one I’ve always wanted to be, but not this version of her. It felt like certain things were happening because the author wanted them to, not because of Jo’s actions. Abby (aka Momma, or Marmee to us traditionalists) is stubborn and I didn’t see any of the qualities in her that I loved from the original, and the author’s portrayal of Dr. March was an absolute joke. The best character in this book is Jo’s boss but even he is missing the qualities that Fritz had in the original book.
I get that this book is based on the original but there are enough scenes from the original book recreated for the modern day that I just expected the characters to live up to the ones I hold so dearly in my heart. I was so excited to read the sequel Beth & Amy but after this I think I’ll skip it and just read the original again.