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Taking place ten years after Little Men, Jo’s Boys shows us the Plumfield clan—led by our aging friends from the original story--growing up. Alcott makes you care deeply about her boys and her girls, giving each dramas of their own. Dan becomes a rough and rugged anti-hero, Nat a tempted world-travelling musician, Nan a single-minded doctor. Josie and Ted are much like their namesakes Jo and Laurie: impulsive and fun and always in need of some moral lesson or other.

It’s a book of racial and class privilege, but for what it is, it is well done. There are some references to woman’s suffrage, and some pretty good answers to the young girls� questions. “Grandpa, must women always obey men and say they are the wisest, just because they are the strongest?�

Alcott has her alter-ego become a famous author of children's books, and gives us a chapter about the downside of literary fame, including being hounded with fan mail requests. “Emerson and Whittier put these things in the wastepaper basket; and though only a literary nursery maid who provides moral pap for the young, I will follow their illustrious example …�

Their little world felt like a utopia to me when I was a young reader, and it was a joy to revisit it. (My copy has the lovely pictures on this cover.) It has been almost half a century, yet there were passages I remembered so well. These little scenes stayed in my mind for all this time!

Demi, on his entrance into book publishing: “I am ready to do anything about books, if it’s only to dust them.� That longing popped in my head often when looking for jobs over the years.

Josie, in an effort to help her brother come up with a creative marriage proposal: “I read in one of Miss Edgeworth’s stories about a man who offers three roses to his lady—a bud, a half-blown, and a full-blown rose.� How often I thought of that when I was picking roses, long after I remembered where the reference was from.

So this book is a part of me, and I was relieved to still enjoy it after so many years. I may have traded the youthful romantic longings that made it my favorite back then, for an appreciation of what it is to watch young people grow into adults, but it still had the power to touch me.

I believe Louisa knew a thing or two about life, and how to shape it into a story that can last a lifetime. It has for me.