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Wednesday, June 9, 2010

Review - The Little Women by Katharine Weber

A book I picked up as you guessed it (I liked the title!). The book involved Meg, Joanna and Amy (thats it) and their parents Janet and Lou. The similarity of the Louisa May Alcott's book with this one stopped after a couple of chapters i.e. the fairytale family background, everyone loving everyone else, though the happily ever after did come at the end.

The book deals with the relationship of children and parents. These three children brought up in an idyllic setting of no parental strife, no sibling quarreling (nothing major anyway) and no financial woes with the teenagers not even aware of from where the money comes in to pay for expensive high school tuition and extra curricular activities. Sounds very normal so far!!!

Their little world is shattered when they accidentally come across an email which indicates that their mother has had an adulterous relationship with Phillip and the worst thing in their minds is the fact that their father knows about it, and has not done anything about it.

At the time the eldest daughter is at university and they unilaterally decide to leave home, not to have anything to do with their parents and "go it alone". The story deals with the travails of living alone, having to fend for themselves and find the finances and resources to be able to live independently. Not as easy as they thought.

At the end of the first year, after a great deal of thinking it through Meg makes contact with their parents much to the dismay, anger, and passionate feelings of the other two siblings. Meg makes them realize that the "affair" of the parents is their problem and how they deal with it and that this does not have anything to do with how their parents feel about them - their daughters. Meg differentiates (which is oh so true) that their mother and father are separate entities in their own relationship and this should not effect them in their individual relationships with their parents.

An interesting book and one I picked up from my Carnegie library.

8 comments:

  1. I always loved this book too. BTW, I had never heard of blue holes until my daughter found out about them.

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  2. I haven't heard of this book before, but I think everyone has to go through that process of independence and realizing that the parental relationship is different from the parents' married relationship.

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  3. I got your message, I entered a bazillion contests to try to win Cleopatra's Daughter and I never won, I get where you're going at! :Dmuth

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  4. This sounds really interesting; I hadn't heard of it before.

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  5. I'm glad the book didn't stay true to Little Women too long - that would totally bug me. It sounds cute!

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  6. I saw this one at the library one time, but never read it. Sounds pretty good though.

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  7. i've never heard of this book but, yes, it definitely sounds very interesting and seems an emotional read.

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  8. I've never heard of this before, but it sounds like a wonderful story. What an important theme to teach as well- sometimes it's hard to learn parents have feet of clay.

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