My YA book group selection for February is So Many Beginnings: A Little Women Remix by Bethany C. Morrow. It is a take off of Little Women where the family is recently freed slaves and the time period is the civil war. I assume it was selected for Black History Month.
The March family in this book are Mammie and her 4 girls: Meg a teacher, Jo a writer, Beth a seamstress, and Amy a dancer (although these nicknames are based on different names – Amy in this book is short for Amethyst). Father Alcott is off fighting for the Union, leaving his family in the house he built them in the Freedpeople Colony on Roanoke Island. I can honestly say I had never heard about this piece of civil war history before.
The book, thank goodness, is less than half the size of the book it is based upon, under 300 pages. The story covers the girls coming of age and the struggles of being free in a not yet free United States. There is lots of commentary, mostly by Jo the writer, about their future and the future of their people.
I had read and enjoyed Little Women (and its sequels) as a child. However, rereading it as an adult several years ago, I was less impressed. I did enjoy the most recent movie version (filmed in and around Boston).
This book just doesn’t feel like the original to me. It is missing too many key parts of the story – Amy being a brat (burning Jo’s manuscript), Beth dying, the kindly old man next door, the wealthy aunt, etc. In my opinion, it completely fails as a Little Women remix (thus I am calling it a re-miss). I think that the author should have just written a historical fiction about the Roanoke settlement. That would have been a far better book.
This book is part of my Passport challenge with a YA Historical Fiction genre.