Like a stock character from American chick lit, Lulu has some very common issues. She is floundering while those around her are getting their lives in some serious order. Her sisters are driving her crazy; one is planning a wonderful wedding, and another has finally achieved her dreams of acting on the West End stage. Lulu’s redemption of sorts comes through a series of old letters she finds in her mother’s attic, which leads to a realization that changes her life.

"THE LITTLE WOMEN LETTERS takes one of the enduring classics of American literature and uses it to concoct a fun and meaningful story about how the past can help us all find our way into the future."  

THE LITTLE WOMEN LETTERS brings the world-renowned dedication and love of Louisa May Alcott’s classic LITTLE WOMEN to a whole new audience, through the life of Lulu. When she discovers Jo March’s letters in her mom’s attic, she realizes that her great-great-grandmother was the energetic life force that gave the book its basis. It is a large stretch of the imagination to consider Jo March as a woman in the real world who has spawned generations of a family, the modern component of which is about to discover her most wondrous gifts. But Gabrielle Donnelley’s book is a spry and enjoyable beach read, written quite obviously with great love for the source material.

This is a novel of sisterhood --- the way that sisters help and sometimes tear each other down but, ultimately, hold on to each other in the storm of modern life because these are connections that are deep and constant. Lulu’s attempts at finding her voice are buoyed by the great advice and honest stories that Jo recorded in her many letters. The letters are, of course, fabricated versions of the tales that Alcott wound about her story of the four March sisters and the formidable Marmee. Her novel is the standard for sisterhood stories, and Donnelley realized that it was impossible to top LITTLE WOMEN’s all-encompassing charm. However, she also recognized that the stories were a great jumping-off point for looking at the more complicated and calculating world of love and family that we all experience in this technological age.

As Lulu deals with everything from her sister’s successes to the sudden disruption of her parents’ seemingly long and happy marriage, she turns not only to her letters but also to her friends for help. Like Bridget Jones’s group of Sex and the City look- and act-alikes, they are concerned deeply with the everyday realities of their love lives. And so Donnelley saves her story from cosmopolitan malaise by looking at today’s realities through the prism of Jo March’s steadfast, open and emotional perspective, coming from another time and place, where life truly was calmer and less cluttered (but still emotionally difficult). The only thing that doesn’t make complete sense is that Jo’s family ends up in England, but perhaps Donnelley thought it helped make a clearer mark between the past and the present.

THE LITTLE WOMEN LETTERS takes one of the enduring classics of American literature and uses it to concoct a fun and meaningful story about how the past can help us all find our way into the future.