Virginia Kantra's Meg and Jo is a modern take on Louisa May Alcott's Little Women, with Jo imagined as a struggling journalist-cum-chef in New York City and Meg as an accountant-turned-stay at home mom in small town North Carolina. Their younger sisters Beth and Amy also have updated lives, as well as the young Mr. Lawrence, March parents, and all the rest.
My overriding memory of Little Women was that Beth died. Without giving away too much, I can reveal that Beth did not die in Meg and Jo, but given how true-to-form Kantra kept things (Eric Bhaer is a German-American chef, among other plot points drawn from the original), I'll be curious to see how Beth fares in the yet-to-be-released Beth and Amy.
Kantra writes well and the ingenuity she displays in recreating Little Women is commendable. Meg and Jo are both incredibly...irritating...which I also vaguely recall. (It's fair to say I wasn't a huge Little Women fan.) That she recreates all of this with such authenticity and yet originality is a testament to her writing chops. All of that said, this is a book best enjoyed, I imagine, by those who loved Little Women and would like to imagine Jo and her sisters carried forward into the 21st century.
Four stars.
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