BELITTLED WOMEN

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.