This favorite book for children, based on the author's own youthful experiences, describes the family life of the Marches in a small New England community. Meg, Jo, Beth, and Amy March are raised in genteel poverty by their loving mother while their father serves as chaplain during the American Civil War. Jo at fifteen is ungainly, unconventional, and enterprising, with an ambition to be an author. Meg, a year older, is pretty and wishes to be a lady. Beth is a delicate child of thirteen with a taste for music. Amy is a blonde beauty of twelve. The story explores their domestic adventures, their attempts to increase the family's small income, their friendship with the neighboring Laurence family, and their later love affairs and destinies as women.
Meg, Jo, Beth, and Amy March, familiar to so many of us, bring their sweetness and moral lessons to audio. The four girls and their mother struggle with war-induced poverty and self-imposed virtue, overridden by a sense of love and family. C.M. Herbert reads the story with the gentle affection and conviction one imagines in Jo March as she reads to her elderly aunt. Her characterizations receive a light touch, distinguishing each sister from the others without actually performing. Herbert allows her amusement and sadness to show at appropriate moments but maintains an overall detachment from the text that suits its soft formality to perfection. R.P.L. (c) AudioFile 2002, Portland, Maine
About the Author
Louisa May Alcott was born on November 29, 1832, in Germantown, Pennsylvania. Educated by her father until she was sixteen, she later studied under Henry David Thoreau, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Theodore Parker. A prolific writer, her most famous work, Little Women, is a timeless American classic.
