In case you’ve ever wanted to read a story that you’ve already read, but told from a different viewpoint, this is your chance. Little Women, written by Louisa Mae Alcott, told her story based largely on her own family from Jo’s viewpoint. Since she was the model for Jo, she knew the narrator well. In Marmee, Sarah Miller returns to the setting with the same story but told from the viewpoint of Jo’s mother who is Marmee in Little Women.
The author did extensive research on the Alcott family and uses it to add reality to the fictional March family. While she rarely changes anything that Alcott wrote in Little Women and follows its storyline consistently, she does add some fiction, such as rounding out characters and adding a plotline for the Hummel family. Her biggest addition concerns her filling in the personalities of the parents in the novel. Amos March’s portrayal in Marmee comes closer to the real-life Bronson Alcott than Louisa Mae’s idealized, though largely absent, father in Little Women and Margaret March has flaws that hardly appear in Little Women. She also adds some of the women’s rights issues that were so important to Louisa Mae and Margaret Alcott in real life.
I found the book, recommended by my daughter who knows my love for Little Women, to be faithful to the original with good historical additions. I guess the only real challenge for me was Miller’s use of “Amos” as the father’s name. If she was going to use his real name, I would have preferred that she use his middle name, “Bronson,” since that is the name he went by in the existential community where he lived. I did find it enjoyable to anticipate how she would tell about things that only Jo would have known as she gave Marmee’s perspective. She did it well by omission or logical ways that Marmee found out, sometimes after the fact. I recommend the book for any fans of Little Women.