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The three books, Little Women, Little Men, and Jo’s Boys, form a complete series, taking the March sisters, along with their families and friends, from girlhood to middle-age. This review tells you about these wonderful but well-known books. I thought I would take, in writing, the more roundabout approach that I took, over time, in getting to know these stories.
When I was in 4th grade, I was given a copy of Little Men from a schoolmate at my birthday party. I ended up reading it many times as I grew up. It did always seem like there was a backstory that was just out of my reach, mysterious persons that came in and out of the main flow of the Plumfield story, but I never wondered about it. In the days of no Internet and a busy boy’s life, I just accepted this gap. The story of Jo Bhaer and her family and the fascinating boys of the Plumfield School continued to hold my interest even through years of reading fantasy and science fiction. In reading Little Men, besides being entertained, I think I learned a lot about practical Christianity, about how to love people as yourself in a non-theoretical way.
Then, when I was a college undergraduate majoring in physics, my older cousin, another science guy like me (but in a lesser field – chemistry!), for some reason gave me Little Women for a Christmas present. But not the whole book – he had bought a hardback edition of just the first part of the story. I had actually never heard of this book before, though I had vague memories of its title from playing the Authors card game when I was young. Upon reading it, I was excited to finally learn some of the back story to Little Men! But there still seemed to be a gap between what I had read in Little Women and what I knew from Little Men. Then I found out, after some library research, that Good Wives was the second part of the complete Little Women story. Finding this at a bookstore, I then found that the gap between Little Women and Little Men had vanished. At that point in my life, I was not really paying attention to chapter titles and I knew nothing of the great work of John Bunyan, The Pilgrim’s Progress, so I missed a lot of meaning in the early part of Little Women.
Jump ahead a few years until after marriage, in graduate school, we went to a church with a literary senior pastor and I found out about Pilgrim’s Progress. What a revelation! Everyone should read that book. Then, turning back one day to Little Women, I realized that the March girls’ game of “playing pilgrims” and chapter titles such as “Beth Finds the Palace Beautiful, Amy’s Valley of Humiliation, Jo Meets Apollyon, and Meg Goes to Vanity Fair,” were taken straight from Bunyan’s classic work. I was so excited. When our first two kids were five and three, we were living in a three-story townhouse and we “played pilgrims.” The bottom floor was the City of Destruction and the top floor was the Celestial City. I was Apollyon, who leapt out at our kids but was defeated by a little wooden sword in the hands of our 5-year-old. All this made the story of Little Women so much richer for me than it had been. The story of the March girls growing up, their love for their parents and for each other, and the cultural and imaginative richness of their daily family life was an inspiration for our family’s home life.
Years later, I found out that there was a sequel to Little Men, Jo’s Boys, which completed the story. Jo’s Boys tells the story of what happened to all the boys and girls in the Plumfield School and in the families of the three surviving March sisters. It is a good story, with some romance and the author’s humor in it, and is especially satisfying for those who always want to know “then what happened.” However, I would have to say it is not quite as good as Little Women and Little Men. Of course, those two books set a very high standard, so Jo’s Boys is still a very good book indeed.
After hearing about the roundabout, many years-long way that I came to read this three-part series, you can imagine that I might be a little bit jealous of those who get to binge the three books straight through! The appropriate reading level can be anything at all, as long as a child is a good enough reader to decode the sentences. The three books are a pleasure to read, with almost nothing archaic about the English used. Standard American English had pretty well settled down by the mid-1800s, so one needn’t be scared away by the thought of “reading a classic in old English!” Boys and girls will like these books, though maybe you should start boys out in the middle with Little Men, like I did…