欧宝娱乐

A long, sometimes tedious, but almost always charming epilogue to Little Women and Little Men. Alcott wrote it in 1886, eighteen years after Little Women and two years before her death. She must have known, feeling the effects of mercury poisoning from her time as a Civil War nurse, that the lights were really going out, the curtain about to fall.

In this book Alcott continues to find a platform for her ideas, including women's suffrage, co-education, rehabilitation for criminals, and temperance, and makes a mini-Republic out of Plumfield where they can play out. Also interesting were Jo's troubles with being a famous writer, which must have echoed Alcott's.

This is the only book in the series that often strays from New England - out west, to London, to a shipwreck at sea - and these parts seemed to be either very sparingly drawn or leaning toward melodramatic. It took some suspension of disbelief to read about Emil's shipwreck and daring heroism, and Dan's rescue of twenty men from a flooded mine.

Still, I though Jo's Boys gave an interesting window into Alcott's ideas and the changing world of the late 19th century (the telephone and camera both make apperances). It's hard not to read it as a what could have been, given the differences between the characters and the people on which Alcott based them. By the time she wrote Jo's Boys, two of Alcott's sisters had died, one had lost a husband, and Alcott herself had never gotten married.

This was a compelling read for me, though, more for its famliar characters and the world it created for them than for its literary genius, and I felt a little sad at the end knowing the curtain had indeed closed on the March family.