10/03/2022
In this lighthearted take on Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women from Sellet (By the Book), a trio of Kansas siblings play their namesakes in “semiprofessional tourist attraction” Little Women Live! High school junior Jo Porter—alongside her older sister, Meg; younger sister, Amy; and a revolving door of Beth-hopefuls auditioning for a permanent role in the cast—has spent seven years performing in their mother’s Little Women–inspired theater production. Jo, frustrated that her mother’s Alcott obsession leaves her with no time to pursue her own goals, including joining the school’s track team, is desperate to regain control of her life. When deadpan New Yorker Hudson and his reporter mother arrive to write a piece on the show, Jo believes they’re her ticket out of Kansas. The Porter siblings’ personalities mirror the March sisters largely at a surface level, occasionally lending to caricature. Nevertheless, the characters’ snappy repartee is both biting and affectionate, and the premise’s cheeky inventiveness—a remix within a remix that both enacts and interrogates the source material—buoys this playful jaunt. Most characters read as white. Ages 14–up. Agent: Bridget Smith, JABberwocky Literary. (Nov.)
With a little grit and a lot of wit and humor, Amanda Sellet dives deep into what it means for a teen to both live up to and strain against expectations, while navigating the challenges of forging one’s own path in life. Jo’s experiences manage to be delightfully outlandish yet perfectly authentic. Belittled Women is a pitch-perfect homage to the messy-yet-loving chaos of family life. — Megan Bannen, author of The Undertaking of Hart and Mercy
Belittled Women is not just for fans of Little Women—it’s also for those of us who love a book featuring a rebellious, smart protagonist, a rustic, charming setting, and prose that makes us literally laugh out loud. Jo is a lovable and hilarious heroine, and readers will also fall in love with her family, her hometown, and her journey to figure out exactly who she is and what she wants. — Raquel Vasquez Gilliland, author of Pura Belpré Award–winning How Moon Fuentez Fell in Love with the Universe
If Nora Roberts wrote a YA Little Women retelling, this would be it. Brimming with effortless banter set against a satisfying slow-burn romance, Belittled Women is the very definition of a romantic comedy. Hilarious from page one, Amanda Sellet draws us into Jo Porter’s waking nightmare: the never-ending carousel of life in a literal Little Women reenactment at her mother’s roadside Kansas attraction. Living under the weight of her alternate life portraying “Book Jo” and her family’s expectations, our Jo can’t wait to bust free, but what’s holding her back might be what’s been holding her together all this time. — Sarah Henning, author of Throw Like a Girl and It's All in How You Fall
I loved this wry, witty, raucous take on Little Women. Sellet nails the absurdity, love, and occasional brawls of sisterhood. The Porters are a boisterous delight. — Jessica Spotswood, author of Great or Nothing
"More of a “what if” than a retelling, this novel will interest fans of the original but will also appeal to teens who are looking to be the weavers of their own tales, clobber their bratty sister a bit, and savor the "almost" moments with the cute boy next door. With quick, breezy prose and relatable dialogue, the Porter sisters may not rival the Marches, but they leave their own mark." — ALA Booklist
With a little grit and a lot of wit and humor, Amanda Sellet dives deep into what it means for a teen to both live up to and strain against expectations, while navigating the challenges of forging one’s own path in life. Jo’s experiences manage to be delightfully outlandish yet perfectly authentic. Belittled Women is a pitch-perfect homage to the messy-yet-loving chaos of family life.
01/20/2023
Gr 9 Up—Jo Porter lives with her older sister, Meg, and her younger sister, Amy, in New Concord, KS; it is not a coincidence that their mom is nicknamed Marmee and is consumed by Louisa May Alcott's Little Women. The teens were bred to be actors in Little Women Live!, a small-town theme park for devotees of Alcott and the simply curious. While Meg is emotionally and physically checked-out and Amy is enthusiastically all-in, narrator Jo is conflicted. She wants to help her mom sustain the family business, especially since money is tight, but she also craves her freedom and the life of a carefree adolescent. Sellet convincingly recreates the look and feel of a close-knit 1860s New England family, but that which makes the story appealing is also its Achilles' heel: readers unfamiliar with the source material will be lost. Without sufficient background knowledge of Little Women (and even with it, at moments), the main characters will grate on readers; Jo and Amy bicker constantly to the point of irritation. While Sellet thoughtfully continues the conversation started by Alcott about society's expectations of women, the book clumsily attempts to address topics such as racial diversity and sexual orientation in a seeming endeavor to compensate for its all-white (except for Laurie) and straight cast. These moments fall flat and go nowhere, as do mentions of climate change that are thrown into the narrative and then deserted. Overall, what could have been a charming, thoughtful recreation of a beloved story is bogged down with too many missteps. VERDICT Recommended only for diehard Alcott fans.—Melissa Kazan
2022-08-31
Tensions—romantic and otherwise—abound for high school junior Jo Porter, better known (though still not all that well, to her dismay) for portraying Jo March in her family’s theater production, Little Women Live!
For the past seven years, Jo and her sisters, Meg, a senior, and Amy, a sophomore—in the absence of a fourth sister, they hold annual auditions for a Beth—have played their parts in turning their mother’s favorite book into a “semiprofessional tourist attraction” on their small Kansas farm. As in Alcott’s book, their father is vaguely elsewhere. From Jo’s point of view the sisters’ personalities track, too: Meg is pretty, Amy spoiled, and despite her wish to earn a cross-country scholarship to college, Jo gets stuck being resentfully responsible. She’s got a crush on David, Meg’s ex who’s signed on to play John Brooke in the upcoming season. When a New York reporter comes to do a possible national feature story on the show, Jo sees her and her cute son, Hudson, as a possible way out of the life she finds stagnant. The main characters are all White except Laurie, a Black classmate with acting ambitions, and some of the Beths. The story starts out meanderingly slowly and heavy on bickering and Little Women references only existing fans will get. Eventually Jo comes into focus and the ending has honesty and heart, though some readers may crave a firmer resolution.
Overly long and unevenly paced. (Fiction. 14-18)
