I’ll confess that I am back dating this post. I finished reading this the third week in December, but never got around to posting a review. This is the case for Little Men and Jo’s Boys which I’m hoping to have posted by Friday.
As the continuation of Little Women I expected more from this novel, however as a middle novel in a ‘trilogy’ (they’re loosely a trilogy, and there are apparently a couple of others tangentially connected) I’m not too surprised with the mediocrity of the work.
The novel takes place 10 years after the end of Little Women, and all of our favorite characters make occasional appearances. The hardest part about reading the novel were all the new names and back-stories. With twelve additional characters to the numerous from Little Women it gets confusing. What I took from the story and truly appreciated is that forced learning never works, nor does solely classroom learning. I’m sure there were many other lessons, but this is the one I found most appealing.
There are few books that I finish reading and truly regret not having read them earlier in life, and this is one of them. However, I’m also glad I haven’t read it previously as I truly doubt I would’ve appreciated the story or the characters as much as I did.