The heart wants what the heart wants, and our hearts want books.

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If you like books about sisters, have we got a tale for you!  Sarah J. Maas’s A Court of Thorns and Roses series, or at least the first 3.5 books, is the story of Feyre, and also her two sisters, Elain and Nesta.  After the family loses their mother, then their wealth (sound familiar?), it falls to Feyre to put food on the table and provide for her older sisters, her father, and herself.  She’s scared, but she moves forward anyway, and I, for one, am always here for a well-told story of courage, and give bonus points for adventure, romance, family drama, and fantasy.   Sign up here to join us for the discussion of the extended trilogy, on Friday, February 12 at 7:30 p.m.

Oh dear readers, I am loving my reading life right now!  Ashley is filling up my list with fun titles, both of the Little Women variety and of the Kindle Unlimited variety (we got a great deal, and you can, too, by clicking the link!), and I am HERE. FOR. IT.  I love a good deep dive into a title (and am only slightly sorry we’re doing it two months in a row), so getting to spend last week with another side of the story, that of Mr. March, and then getting this week’s title have been such a joy!

When I finished Meg & Jo by Virginia Kantra, I quickly texted Ashley to ask what our weekend holiday romance would be and then said “Also, DO NOT APPROVE THE LACK OF EPILOGUE.”  To which she replied, “ the epilogue is called Beth & Amy.”  I did not read the teaser, because I don’t usually unless I’m going straight through, and I’m SO excited about Beth & Amy except the whole not until May part!  What is this book about?  So, take Little Women but present (pre-pandemic) day and in small town North Carolina.  We’re mixing our timelines here a smidge with the sisters, but it all works in context.  I’ve always seen myself as a cross between Meg and Jo and this book brought it all home for me.  How I’m a blend of both and frequently feel the pull to lean in the opposite direction than I feel I’m leaning in the season (or moment, depending), so reading a modern book with an alternating point of view was such a fun time!  I want the next volume, but I also want more on Marmee!  Even in March, her character is always supporting and I really enjoy the depth Kantra shows for her in Meg & Jo.  We don’t get much from her, but what we do is so reflective of the Marmee I know and love as well as a more complete character.  

Who wins Meg & Jo though?  Eric Bhaer 1000%  I adore Gabriel Byrne, and I enjoyed Louis Garrel, but a considerate, self-aware chef who pours his heart onto a plate?  Be still my heart!  I was sold before Kantra added in the tattooed arm-porn aspect and had him tutoring me on the proper preparation of scrambled eggs.  (And, dear readers, I used some of my new-found knowledge last night when making brinner – breakfast for dinner – and I got compliments on the eggs!)  I have never wanted to be in a kitchen on the line (not even when I had to settle squabbles between the back and front of house staff in college), but I want to know more now!  I want to know about Costanza and Ray, oh that Ray has a story to tell.  Do I think we’re going to get it?  Maybe a peek in Beth & Amy, but not much, although I’d read that book for sure, and one about Aunt Phee’s past too!  (Characters like this are part of what makes me always want more epilogue and also love a long romance series – these supporting characters might just get their own book in a romance series!)  

I give Meg & Jo an enthusiastic four stars and pronounce it a great holiday read!  You don’t need the original story to appreciate this book, but you’ll appreciate it more if you adore the classic because it’s like coming home again.  I’m likely to re-read this, especially before reading Beth & Amy, which comes out in May, and I’m also very interested in Kantra’s backlist.  

What characters of a well-loved book do you need to know better?

~Nikki 

Meg & Jo was a top 5 book of 2019 for me if you remember way back a year ago when we were discussing our 2019 favorites. While scrolling through all my typical research mess before typing a blog post, I pulled open my Goodreads to make note of my highlights (62 of them!) and remind myself how long it took me to read it. Approximately 24 hours, because it was the Christmas gift I gave my reading life last year, as I read it from December 25-26. It’s not a surprise that this book is as good as it is. Virginia Kantra has written 30 novels, mostly romance: paranormal romance, romantic suspense, contemporary romance – which Meg & Jo definitely falls under, and women’s fiction. Her novels have won awards and nominations galore, including two National Readers’ Choice Awards and Romance Writers of America’s RITA Awards. She lives in North Carolina, married her college sweetheart, and her favorite thing to make for dinner is reservations. A woman after my own heart, bless hers.

Maybe the author herself would want to make reservations at the New York City restaurant where Eric Bhaer is head chef and at which Jo March finds herself employed after she was fired from the newspaper where she worked as a journalist. Maybe it’s because she’s read Jo’s food blog or followed her on instagram, which is the writing outlet she uses while trying to not become homeless in NYC. But, Jo returns home to Bunyan, NC (a real place, according to Google, but not on the Cape Fear River as Kantra imagines) for Thanksgiving after her mother fell down in her goat barn before her sister Meg found her lying in pain in the hay. Jo repeatedly compares her and Meg’s relationship as close as Jane and Lizzi Bennet in Pride and Prejudice with enough similar personality characteristics to receive sass on the regular from Amy.

Besides Eric Bhaer winning Meg & Jo, an assessment for which I seven thousand percent agree, John Brook is second place. Yes, there’s miscommunication in his and Meg’s marriage, but overall, he’s a much more hands on parent, excited to be a father to his 2.5 year old twins Daisy and DJ, than Meg remotely gives him credit for. I really enjoyed their relationship and how Meg tries to emulate Marmee in all things, doing for John and the twins what Marmee had done for her four girls, the goat farm, and her military chaplain husband turned veterans non-profit organizer. I didn’t highlight it and perhaps Nikki can confirm, but, I remember a conversation near the end of the book where Marmee states that she did all the things she did because her husband literally wouldn’t help, so she always had to be strong and accomplish the necessities of life for the entire family or it would fall apart. [Nikki here: I can’t confirm a quote, but that was most definitely the feeling, that everyone else not in his house was more “in need” of his attention.] Meg goes in expecting John to act the same way, but thank god his is a much more modern approach to marriage, where both partners do their fair share at home and at work to keep the household running. I fear that many modern marriages suffer the same paralysis of expectation, where the women feel like their spouse wants everything taken care of, dinner on the table, children handled, and house cleaned. But these husbands don’t care as much about the timing or thoroughness of the execution as long as one or both of them accomplish the household tasks and their wives just want it done perfectly. (Hi, it’s me, but I’m getting better.) 

One thing in Meg & Jo that really made me think was the character of Hannah. She is a close family friend of the Marches, rather than a live-in servant, and is a black woman whose daughter graduated from Howard University, an HBCU in Washington, D.C. and who attends Greater Zion Baptist Church, not Ashton March’s congregation. Alcott hadn’t described Hannah as much more than an extension of the March family and gave her a dialect unlike the educated Marches. I always thought Hannah’s accent in Little Women was decidedly Southern rather than the Irish brogue that other writers have described her dialect as. What if, as Kantra has written Hannah Mullett here, Hannah has always been a dark-skinned Southern lady? I don’t want to go so far as suggest that Alcott had written a stereotypical Mammy character in Little Women, but what if her Hannah was a formerly enslaved person who was granted manumission, made her way up North to a sympathetic family and ended up staying on literally for the rest of her life? And that we as readers don’t think of her as not white because she wasn’t described as one thing or the other?

But the clincher that earned Kantra a 5 star review for Meg & Jo was the subtle and giggle-inducing humor throughout the book. Jo’s reactions to Marmee’s attitude with her husband landed some hearty belly guffaws. And then, of course, were the several mentions of a Southern Woman Card and the possibility that it could be revoked, like by being caught outside of the house without at least mascara on. That is real and relatable and exactly how I speak to my sister and my friends that have become like my sisters. I’ve re-read large chunks of Meg & Jo, and really wanted to do an entire re-read before this blog post was to be written, but December’s been a mess so I didn’t have the time to complete a re-read. A cover to cover reread is on the table especially since I bought a digital copy after I loved reading the library copy last year. Additionally, I pre-ordered Beth & Amy so that I will have it ASAP at its release in May! Don’t you love these matching covers that include all four sisters on each one, but just the main pair as the center of their own cover? Yes, me, too!

I hope you have enjoyed our month long deep dive into Little Women this December. What are your favorite holiday-themed reads so that I can get a headstart on prepping for 2021?!

~Ashley

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The following post includes affiliate links. More details here.  As you’re doing your Amazon shopping, we’d be ever so grateful if you’d use our affiliate link to do so as it helps pay the bills around here!

Dear readers, it is cold outside, which means I want to curl up in front of a fire, with a blanket, a hot beverage, and my warm dog, just like every day, but I digress.  As it’s cold, I’m drawn to books that make me thankful I’m safe and inside, with central heat and lots of blankets.  Books I feel drawn to include characters who defy the elements, and often people’s opinions of them, like Elizabeth in Janette Oke’s When Calls the Heart (although the scene I’m thinking of is in book #4 of the series) and Feyre in Sarah J. Maas’s A Court of Thorns and Roses series.  Let Feyre suck you into her world this winter as the days are still growing shorter.  Let her show you how “the forest had become a labyrinth of snow and ice” and what happens when a young woman goes hunting in the dead of winter to feed her family.  Let her show you courage and perseverance, which we all need a little more than usual this season, and then sign up here to join us to talk about it, and the rest of the extended trilogy, on Friday, February 12 at 7:30 p.m.

It’s not a spoiler that I generally want more cowbell epilogue, so when Ashley told me about Geraldine Brooks’s March I was committed to reading it.  While I do want more epilogue, I’m also here for more prologue, and a different point of view, particularly from a character who’s largely off-screen during the original!  March is the story of Mr. March, and to a lesser extent Marmee.  Brooks lets us tag along with Mr. March on his journey during the Civil War, and while we’re seeing what Alcott doesn’t share in his letters to his little women in her tome, we also see glimpses into the man Mr. March is before he meets Marmee, and during their courtship and early marriage as well.  Yes readers, I like more background, more follow-up, and really just more words, pages, chapters, and books to read about characters who are near and dear to my heart!  (See also: why I love a series!)

All that said, when I first read March, it had been decades since I’d read Little Women, so I didn’t have the recent memory of Alcott’s Mr. March that I have now.  However, even in my early text of Little Women Mr. March feels very much in the periphery of the story.  In some ways he very much is, especially in the first volume, but even in the second, his world is separate from that of the women in his life, which feels very much in line with my understanding of the times and their societal standing.  

As much as Little Women feels like a coming of age story for Jo, Meg, Beth, and Amy, March feels like that for Mr. March, with a side of Marmee.  When we meet Mr. March, in the beginning of this tale, he’s writing letters home.  He’s traveling through Virginia with his unit, and stumbles upon the same path he walked 20 years ago as a traveling salesman just shy of his nineteenth birthday, and masterfully Brooks transitions us through 1861 and 1841, helping us to understand how Mr. March became the man whose values and convictions inspire Marmee and their daughters.  Brooks shows the readers the experiences that shaped this man, how he met Margaret Marie Day, and what drew them together.  Perhaps my favorite pieces of this book were the glimpses that spoke to specific passages in Little Women.  As someone with a bit of a temper, I adore the scenes in Little Women when Marmee and Jo discuss Jo’s temper and how she’s very much like Marmee was before she learned more self-control.  Reading about the history of this, the truth of how Marmee struggled and stumbled with her temper in March makes her guidance to Jo in Little Women so much more rich and meaningful.  Brooks does this throughout, and I don’t want to spoil more, because if you adore Little Women, I do hope you’ll give March a read too, especially as it’s only 280 pages and would make for a perfect Jólabókaflóð read.  

I give March a solid four stars and am likely to reread it again.  I’m also interested in Brooks’s other titles, and particularly intrigued after figuring out she was married to Tony Horwitz (of Travels with Tony and Fred) until his passing in 2019.  (In case you’re wondering, I’m 100% here for Pulitzer Prize winning power couples.  I’m confident Ashley has more in store for us on Brooks’s part of that.)  I love a well-told story that sheds a different light on a familiar story and enriches it (yes, that does mean I’m here for fanfic, as long as it’s well done!).  March is that, and it’s also a gorgeous tale in it’s own right.  If you’re wondering what to give that Little Women fan in your life, stalk them on Goodreads, and consider this title.  

What book has given you a heart-felt deep dive into a familiar title or topic?

~Nikki

Geraldine Brooks won the Pulitzer Prize in Fiction in 2006 for her novel March and it is unreservedly earned. An Australian-born and -educated journalist, Brooks began her career working for The Sydney Morning Herald, won a scholarship for a journalism master’s program at Columbia University in New York in 1982, then worked for The Wall Street Journal where she covered crises in the Middle East, Africa, and the Balkans. She is the author of five novels and three works of non-fiction, including Nine Parts of Desire: The Hidden World of Islamic Women and her memoir Foreign Correspondence. I’m considering her memoir as my next jump into Brooks’ work rather than another of her novels, but I’m here for those, too.  She married Tony Horwitz in Tourette-sur-Loup, France, in 1984 and has lived as child of the world in their homes in Sydney, Australia, and Martha’s Vineyard, Massachusetts – though during the writing of March, as is mentioned in the afterword, a former home in Virginia gave her the nugget of inspiration for March when a contractor found a Civil War soldier’s belt buckle in the yard. This 8 minute interview from NPR is a short listen and it’s interesting to hear of the inspiration for the story from the author’s voice.

I definitely consider the marriage of Brooks and Horwitz to exemplify the term ‘power couple,’ but March is itself a book about marriage and the struggles each spouse has in living their life for and with another person. Forgive me for taking a large chunk out of the afterword, but this quotation, for me, exemplifies how someone can change within themselves and their marriage:

Lastly, I should like to take a flyleaf from George Eliot’s Middlemarch, which she dedicated to her “dear husband . . . in this nineteeth year of our blessed union.” In the nineteeth year of our own union, I retract unreservedly my former characterization of my husband, Tony Horwitz, as a Civil War bore. Further, I would like to apologize for all the times I refused to get out of the car at Antietam or whined about the heat at Gettysburg; for all the complaints about too many shelves colonized by his Civil War tomes and all the moaning over weekend expeditions devoted to events such as the interment of Stonewall Jackson’s horse. I’m not sure quite when or where it happened, but on a sunken road somewhere, I finally saw the light. 

The story between Mr. March and Marmee is the story of two people, in their separate inner lives and together in their marriage. Marmee takes over some of the narrative when Mr. March is injured, and we are gifted with her perspective on his idealism (an idealism they both share and which brought them together) and the struggles that idealism brings to their married life. We know things she doesn’t know, however, about how the war has made March reconsider the ideals and truths to which he once so staunchly held. I highlighted 33 sections of this book, which is considerable for only having read it once, and every single one of them is a golden example of poetic writing and deep insight. I am loathe to spoil the book, as usual, but I love how a perfect example of a struggle that Mr. March’s expectations and ideals bring to their marriage is that the passion and anger and ability to express herself March claims is Marmee’s self-degradation with her lack of self-mastery are the very things which attracted him to her before they wed! Oh, the irony, dear readers! And what woman doesn’t feel those same hypocrisies in her own marriage at some point or another? These life-truths found in fiction are disturbing and force one to think, but also admit as Marmee does: For to have asked him to do otherwise would have been to wish him a different man. And I knew then that I loved this man. This inconstant, ruined dreamer. 

What was the last work of fiction you read that made an impact on the way you viewed something in real life?

~Ashley

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