Review: Little Women and Me by Lauren Baratz- Logsted.

*EDITED TO ADD: Taking cue from Jane at Dear Author, I thought it pertinent to alert my readers that I don’t support plagiarists but this author seems to (from a guest blog she wrote to promote a well known plagiarists blog). I won’t be recommending this authors work to my family, friends or blog readers in the future.

Main Character: Emily
Love Interest:
Series: None
Author: Website|Facebook|Twitter|Goodreads

Emily is sick and tired of being a middle sister. So when she gets an assignment to describe what she’d change about a classic novel, Emily pounces on Little Women. After all, if she can’t change things in her own family, maybe she can bring a little justice to the March sisters. (Kill off Beth? Have cute Laurie wind up with Amy instead of Jo? What was Louisa May Alcott thinking?!) But when Emily gets mysteriously transported into the 1860s world of the book, she discovers that righting fictional wrongs won’t be easy. And after being immersed in a time and place so different from her own, it may be Emily-not the four March sisters-who undergoes the most surprising change of all. Lauren Baratz-Logsted’s winning confection will appeal to fans of Little Women as well as anyone who enjoys a modern twist on an old favorite.

I can’t really say why I wanted to read this book because I’ve never read Little Women before so I didn’t want to see how this modern twist on the whole story would be (though modern twist is a bit of a stretch but well, you know what I mean) but interested in it, I was. So I requested it for review and was stoked when I got it.

I will say that this book has made me want to read Little Women because it cracked me up. Getting to know all of the March sisters, Jo, Meg, Amy and what not was interesting, well having to get to know them through Emily’s time travel experience was cool. I can’t compare this story with the actual story but I will say that being thrown into the world of one of your favorite books has got to be pretty thrilling. Getting a chance to change something you wanted would be even better, don’t you think?

In this book, Emily knows exactly what she wants to change and when she’s given a chance to do just that, she rushes off and the adventure begins. Emily is thrown right into the story of Little Women and sees the March sister for the first time. Her normal reaction is to freak out and freak out, she does. But over the course of the book, Emily really does come into her own. I really enjoyed that part of the book, we see the change in Emily start and then slowly and surely, her change happens and she’s a better person for all of it. I’ll tell you what though, there were times a plenty that I wanted to choke Emily the heck out but I let her slide on a lot of it because of her age. It would have been easy to not like Emily at all with all of the crap she pulls in this book but Baratz-Logsted does a great job of making the reader connect and understand what Emily is going through and where her head is throughout the entire book.

I cracked up quite a few times when I was reading this book (Emily getting her period back in the day had me laughing out loud), it was interesting reading this book having not read Little Women (or seeing the movie for that matter) but it was easy enough to follow along and enjoy the story anyway.

I was digging on Laurie for a hot minute there and was glad that things worked out the way that they should have (or from what I know, anyway) on that note between him and Jo. The whole thing with Jackson and Charlotte worked out the way that it was supposed to and I’ll say that in the beginning, that conversation between Kendra and Emily played through my mind toward the end of the book and was glad that Emily finally…got it. You really see that she learned a thing or two from the lesson her teacher was trying to teach and you saw her grow which I appreciated. There have been a few times when I read an entire book and I hate the protagonist just as much at the end as I did in the beginning. I feel like they don’t learn or grow as much as I would have liked but that wasn’t the case with this book. Emily was hard to take at times but at the end, you were glad that you stuck it out with her because she finally got it right.

I recommend this book to fans of Little Women and to fans of this author, it was a delightful read that made me want to try other stories by this author.

..and that’s your scoop!

Buy the book: B&N|Amazon|Book Depository
Book cover and blurb credit: http://barnesandnoble.com

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