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    Little Women
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    Little Women
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    Little Women
    Audiobook19 hours

    Little Women

    Written by Louisa May Alcott

    Narrated by C.M. Hebert

    4/5

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    About this audiobook

    Little Women is the story of the March family, specifically the four daughters: Meg, Jo, Beth, and Amy. The story involves their family adventures, their attempts to improve their income, their friendship with the neighboring Laurence family, and their romances.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherBlackstone Audio
    Release dateJan 1, 2006
    ISBN9780786104895
    Author

    Louisa May Alcott

    Louisa May Alcott was a 19th-century American novelist best known for her novel, Little Women, as well as its well-loved sequels, Little Men and Jo's Boys. Little Women is renowned as one of the very first classics of children’s literature, and remains a popular masterpiece today.

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    Reviews for Little Women

    4/5

    6,144 ratings184 reviews

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    • 5/5
      The classic tale of the March sisters--Meg, Jo, Beth, and Amy. It's a coming-of-age tale in many ways as the girls grow up and most find love. Marmee imparts wisdom when her daughters seek it. The neighboring Laurance family, particularly Laurie, plays an important role in the book. Jo begins her career as a writer. This classic never fails to make me cry. Even though I know it is coming, I never want Beth to die.
    • 3/5
      Somewhat entertaining read. I did get a little weary of the repeated moral preaching by adults.
    • 3/5
      While it is a charming coming of age tale, I found it a tad slow and a bit dry, I really like the movie though.
    • 3/5
      It's interesting to listen to a book written in the 1800's. The dialog isn't that great and some of the phrases mean something totally different in 2016. For example snowballing. I didn't know what it meant in 2016 until I typed it in during my bing rewards searches. Of course Louisa May Alcott was talking about an innocent snow ball fight. I think with classics like this, I might stick with the movie.
    • 4/5
      Although this was a novel primarily intended for a female audience, I still found this incredibly likable and appealing. There is much here: sorrow, friendship, family, yearnings, disillusionment, and closure. The characters are vivid and the setting serves as a ready placard to explore their innermost feelings, desires, and emotions. The plot does not waver, it stays concentrated and focused on the intrigues of its principal characters and I feel that it managed to accomplish all that was intended. Overall, a great book. 4 stars.
    • 1/5
      I was given this book when I was a child by my aunt. I absolutely hated it. If I had been a boy, I would have received something like Jules Verne, Gulliver's Travels or The treasure Island. Instead I had to settle for this crap and similar books about nice proper idle stupid girls. No wonder I hated being a girl. I still do. To be precise, now I hate being a woman.
    • 5/5
      Yes, it is that good. I read it as a child, and have read it twice again as an adult. Alcott draws you in, and you inhabit her world.
    • 5/5
      Oh, my childhood. I remember reading this when I was much younger (and fresh out of the Little House on the Prairie books). I absolutely love this book and have memories of watching the movie (with Winona Ryder) and just falling in love with it all over again. Highly recommend this classic. Such a lovely tale of family, friendship, and strong women.
    • 4/5
      How odd to be reading this for the first time as an adult! Somehow, growing up, I missed out on reading Little Women, but the PBS Great American Reads program piqued my curiousity. What it is about this book that, 150 years later, still earns it a place among America's top 100 novels? And now that I've read it, I get it. This coming-of-age tale about four sisters growing up relative poverty in the years following the civil war is charming, sentimental, entertaining, romantic, and profoundly moral. There's a temptation to judge the tale by 21st moral values, which scrutiny might raise some hackles. For instance, Alcott's chapters - each a little morality tale in itself - resolutely preach that the ultimate life's goal of all women should be marriage, that women should be dutiful to men, that poverty and humility are more honorable than wealth and striving. Through the lens of today's standards, it's hard not to cringe a little when Meg saves her marriage by pretending to be interested in things that interest her husband, when the sisters consistently suffer humiliation every time they make the mistake of craving something material, or when Jo gives up her writing career rather than risk offending the sensibilities of a man. But there are also many moral lessons in here that have stood the test of time - such as honoring your mother/father, marrying for love rather than money, allowing men to take a part in the rearing of their children, and treating people the way you'd wish to be treated - and, besides, there's something inherently unfair in judging a book written over 150 years ago by modern standards, right?What Alcott does best is create a lovely, nostalgic portrait of childhood the way we all want to believe it used to be, full of tree-climbing and apple-picking, wise mothers, moral fathers, picnics and family parties, flirting and fooling and make-believe, with just enough work to thrown in to teach responsibility, just enough mischief added to inculcate morality, just enough sorrow endured to sweeten satisfaction, just enough heartbreak suffered to invest wisdom, and just enough hardship endured to guarantee appropriate appreciation of the blessings of friendship and love. In other words, Little Women is like comfort food for the soul: it's not so much about maximizing nutrition as about evoking memories of a happier and simpler time when morality was a little less complicated and we were all a lot more innocent.
    • 3/5
      This is another one of those "childhood classics" that I managed to miss reading when I was actually a child. I'm still trying to decide whether or not this is a good thing. I think that, had I tried reading it as a child, I would have been just a bit bored by the story overall. But as an adult reader, I find I am probably less forgiving of things I perceive as flaws in the writing.

      Coming to it as an adult reader, I can see why it is viewed as a classic, and I enjoyed reading it, but I also don't think it would really be publishable today. The pacing is somewhat uneven--it seemed that just when things would start to pick up a good pace we would be treated to another "now gentle reader" moment, highlighting the moral lessons we should be learning from the story, and also bringing the forward momentum of the story to a halt.

      I had problems with Beth as a character, mostly because I don't feel she really was a character. Of the main characters, she is the only one whose viewpoint we don't really see. We are told she is sweet and perfect and wonderful and beloved, but the only real evidence we have of these things is circumstantial at best: Beth is wonderful because we are told she is wonderful. Consequently, the major plot points that hinge on Beth all struck me as a little bit fake, which was rather unfortunate.

      I liked John and Laurie and Professor Bhaer, and I enjoyed the romances that came with them (though again, it seemed like we got an awful lot of preaching and moralising whenever something interesting was about to happen).

      I'm glad I read it, and I may very well read it again at some point, but probably not for several years.

      ----
      Some edition-specific notes:

      The Barnes & Noble Classics ebook edition is, for the most part, quite good. It comes with quite a bit of supplementary material in the form of a biography of the author; historical background of both when the book was written and the time period in which it was set; and approximately twenty pages of endnotes and footnotes, all hyper-linked within the book itself.

      I would have preferred to see the information about the author and her history placed at the end of the text rather than the beginning. Ditto with the introduction, which, like most such introductions, assumes the reader is already familiar with the text.

      The proofreading of the ebook text is...spotty. As far as I can tell it was typeset by scanning an existing print copy of the book, using OCR technology to render the text. On the whole, this works perfectly well, but there are a number of places where words are split oddly (e.g. "beg inning" instead of "beginning"), or specific letters were not translated correctly, leading to spelling errors (e.g. "tor" instead of "for").
    • 4/5
      I've seen a couple of movie versions but never actually read the book, so here we go...
    • 2/5
      I almost did not finish this book. I found it the storytelling a little too whimsical and old fashioned. However, I made myself finish the book by reading a chapter a day. Once I got into the rhythm of reading only a chapter a day I found myself liking the Little Marches. This is definitely not my genre of books, but I am glad I finished it. This book is about four young sisters, Meg, Jo, Amy and Beth. They are not rich in money but they are rich in love and happiness. Their mother and father have provided everything they could, but mainly taught them to be kind, generous and caring women. They each take their own path and find happiness. I want to watch the movie now!
    • 3/5
      Third time lucky! This was the third attempt at reading this book and I finally read it and enjoyed it. It took time for me to persevere through it and really engage with the sisters and their family. I can understand how this is a must read book and it was a nice read. I think I'm probably not its real target audience and its one of those books, I read due to it being a classic.All in all, it was nice enough and I'm glad I read it!
    • 5/5
      Read when I was young and I laughed and cried with the "little women".
    • 5/5
      I don't often re-read books, but I had read this so very long ago (50 years) that I thought I might be interesting to read from an adult perspective. I read it beginning when I was six, because my mother so loved it. Honestly, six is a little young for it, even with a precocious kid, but I persevered and got through it.

      What surprised me on re-reading it is that I had remembered every detail of the plot quite accurately, which says something about how vividly Alcott drew her characters and how memorably she plotted their adventures.

      It's a very good book, but what struck me on this reading was the same thing I thought at age six: It made no sense for Jo to finally fall in love and get all gushy over a geriatric German professor. It's the only real false note in the novel, but it's a whopper. Her rejection of Laurie makes sense, but then to fall for the professor? I just don't buy it.
    • 4/5
      It is tough to get into it at first, because they just seem too perfect, but the book really picks up if you just keep going. I really enjoyed it, and am very glad I finally read it. This one will be staying on my bookshelf and will be read many more times!
    • 5/5
      Absolutely loved it and can't believe I waited so many years to get around to reading it.
    • 5/5
      I guess I'm giving it 5 stars just on sheer number of rereads. I could practically recite this.
    • 5/5
      A classic from my childhood.
      Well written and compelling. The importance of the bonds of family, friendships and relationships are themes that are still as relevant today as when Alcott first wrote her story.
    • 4/5
      Reading through Little Women I kept wishing I'd read it as a girl. Now that I'm grown I found myself identifying with different aspects of the girls' natures. I'm definitely a Jo, and I nearly wept when Teddy married Amy because... I want a Teddy, not a Professor...

      Personal preferences aside, the book completely blessed me and it also gave me a lot to think about.
    • 2/5
      Disclaimer: I have read this book exactly once before. And now for the very unpopular opinion…I didn’t really like it. The first half of the book just bored me to tears, and while Jo’s story definitely picked up in the second half, I still had a hard time getting through the chapters. Alcott puts a lot of emphasis on the morality exhibited by the girls, which by today’s standards seem also comical, and the some of the characters are only one-dimensional and their only purpose is to exhibit goodness. I am curious to pick up Alcott’s other work, though, after giving this a reread.
    • 5/5
      I had an earlier version by far than the edition pictured, given to me by my great aunt when I was 10. It was the great book of my childhood, the book we acted out in the dusty streets of a suburban, tract home town all one long summer, fighting over which sister was the best. And of course everyone wanted to be bold Jo, but I always had a soft spot in my heart for vain, ambitious Amy. I could never get my daughter to read it; she balked at the cozy world, the homilies, the pious little girls giving away their Christmas breakfast, the silly...to her mind...love stories.

      But I love this book still. It seduced me to finding out more about the world of the Alcotts, and of New England in the Civil War period. And thus I found Thoreau (whom Louisa apparently was in love with) and Emerson, and a whole world of thought.

      Which was heady stuff for a 10 year old, let me tell you. I reread Little Women every few years. I've read everything else Alcott wrote as well, from the potboiler thrillers to all the tidy romances. Maybe a grandchild of mine will like her, someday.
    • 2/5
      My mother used to read this to me when I was little until I told her to stop. There was a lot of sheet sewing and they always seemed on the verge of doing something interesting but never actually got around to it.
    • 5/5
      When I read this in elementary school, I found it very boring. But then, what could a child addicted to television find appealing about "playing Pilgrims"? As a grown-up homeschooling mom, I found the book delightful. I read this just after reading almost all of Jane Austen's novels and the contrast was quite refreshing. The March girls are just the kinds of heroines I want my daughter to emulate. They are real characters with real faults that they are able to overcome through sincere effort. They are brave and daring young women who are not saved by marriage, nor is making a financially advantageous match their first goal when choosing a mate. Marriage in this book is just what I hope I'm modeling for my children: a partnership based on mutual love and respect, and held together through loving compromise rather than sacrifice by one party or the other.

      This book was also particularly interesting after having learned more about the intellectual and spiritual culture of New England during the second half of the 19th century.
    • 5/5
      Great book with wonderful storytelling. Jo, Meg, Beth, and Amy are vibrant, believable characters that are hard to forget.
    • 4/5
      I think it goes without saying that Little Women is a classic. Who doesn't know the story of Meg, Jo, Amy and Beth? Okay, so female readers of all ages probably know it better than men but either way, there is no denying it's a classic! Plus, plus, plus! They made a movie out of it!So. To repeat the obvious: This is the story of the March women - Mrs. March and her four daughters. Too old to be drafted into service, Mr. March enlists to be a chaplain in the civil war. While he is away Mrs. March and her girls keep a modest house house in Concord, Massachusetts. The story centers around the four daughters and their four very different personalities. Alcott was ahead of her time when she created the character of Josephine ("Jo"). Jo is an ambitious tomboy who cuts her hair and wants to be a unmarried writer. She is referred to as male by herself (saying she is the man of the house while Father is away) and by her father (who calls her "son"). It's an interesting dynamic to the plot. The rest of the March women are as Victorian as can be. I try to refrain from seeing them as prissy. They are all very pretty and wishy-washy and have talent. As a aside, the storytelling reminded me of Anne of Green Gables.
    • 3/5
      Before I start this review, I do want to mention that this is the first book review I've ever written. It may not be the most detailed, longest, or generally best review you've ever read, so I hope you'll give me a break.Little Women is one of the classics that I've been interested in reading for a long time and unfortunately, I feel like I probably would have enjoyed this book much more had I read it at a younger age. Perhaps instead of attempting to read Gone With The Wind at age 13, I should have read this. I couldn't get into Gone With The Wind as a young teen, but found it far more appealing when I read it as an adult. And I feel Little Women is much better suited for women younger than me (I'm only 23).At the start, I was grumbling thinking this was going to be just a book about a bunch of spoiled girls that whine about all the things they don't have. Yes, I have a bad habit of judging things early on, and probably could have realized that a book that is nothing but talk amongst spoiled girls probably wouldn't be likely to be a classic. I kept on reading and soon realized it was indeed more than that. It does seem to send the message to girls that your goal in life is to get married and be a housewife, so I feel the morals are pretty outdated. I'm indifferent on the religious aspects so I won't go into that.If I could I'd give this book 3.5 out of 5 stars. Typically I think 3 stars is an ok book and 4 stars is a good book, this just sits somewhere in the middle. It never bored me and I never thought there were any dry points in the book, but I found myself not reading it because I wanted to know what happened next, but reading it because I just wanted to get done with it and move on to something else. Even though it may not seem like it, I did enjoy the book, but I didn't have a strong connection to it. Which may be because of most of the morals ot having much meaning in this day and age, or because the major plot points of the book were all spoiled for me. Likewise, it also doesn't hold much of a reread value, but I am glad to finally have this read and I wasn't disappointed.
    • 5/5
      This is without a doubt my favorite book. It tells of the struggles of growing for the March family. It starts during the Civil War can continues until the sisters have families of their own. This book is a classic story of sisterhood showing both the bad times and the good. I believe the essence of the story holds true to today's times and I have gone back to the March family many times.
    • 5/5
      Louisa May Alcott's story about the four March sisters who learn the hard lessons of poverty and of growing up in New England during the Civil War.
    • 5/5
      Why did I never read this book before? This was so enjoyable and easy to read even though it is considered a "classic". Still think that Jo should have ended up with Laurie. Oh well.