Beth and Amy is a pitch-perfect retelling of Little Women / Good Wives from the point of view of Beth, Amy, and occasionally Abigail March. It completely captures the personalities of the March girls and their friends and family, while bringing them convincingly into the modern era. I loved it.

Amy is returning to Bunyan for her sister Jo’s wedding to Eric Bhaer, and is apprehensive about seeing Trey Lawrence again. She has had a crush on him since she was twelve, and they had a one-night stand in Paris three years ago, shortly after Jo broke up with him for the last time. It ended awkwardly, and they haven’t spoken since. Meanwhile, Beth is struggling with her career as a country musician – she loves writing songs, but hates performing, and her spotlight-loving and demanding boyfriend seems to view her more as a prop than a person.

And back home, Abby March finally got tired of her husband’s tendency to put his calling ahead of his family, and asked him to move out. But he’s still living just down the road, and is making noises about wanting to try again and do better.

You know, I’m going to do this out of order, because I want to start with Abby and Ash. I really, really loved the decision to have them be separated at the start of the book. Both Mr March and to an even greater extent Louisa May Alcott’s own father always seemed like the sort of men who are saintly in a way that leaves the women of the family to look after everything, and in a modern era, it absolutely made sense to me that Abby had finally had enough. Mr March left his job as a pastor for a nice church in town to work as an army chaplain in Iraq, leaving his wife to raise their four daughters at home on his chaplain’s pay. She moved back to her family farm, and basically did everything herself for years on end. The way their relationship was drawn had parallels to things I’ve read about the pressures on the families (especially the wives) of pastors, as well as to things I’ve read about returning veterans finding that their family now functions as a unit without them, and they can’t find their place any more. I liked that we could see the ways in which Mr March really was exceptionally good at his job, as well as how that made him very insufficient as a husband and parent.

We see the family mostly through the eyes of Beth and Amy, the two youngest daughters. Meg and Jo are already happily established at the start of the story – Meg, ‘the responsible one’ has her husband and her twins and her accounting job, and Jo, ‘the clever one’, is a best-selling author about to be married to a famous chef, Eric Bhaer. (Eric has just opened a restaurant in Jo’s aunt Phee’s old mansion, which is intended to both provide fine dining to the town of Bunyan, and provide training and experience for traumatised veterans and young people who lack opportunities. So that’s your nod to Little Men and Jo’s Boys right there.)

But Beth ‘the good one’ and Amy ‘the pretty one’ are still figuring out who they are and what they want. And this is made harder by the roles assigned to them by their family. Amy feels that she is always in competition with her older sisters and unable to measure up to them – ‘pretty’ is almost dismissive when you stand it next to ‘responsible’, ‘clever’ and ‘good’.

And for Beth, being the ‘good one’ often equates to being the one who can’t make a fuss, can’t express anger or anxiety or guilt, and can’t say no. Everyone tells her that with a voice like hers, she should be a performer, and so she is, even though she throws up before – and sometimes during – every performance.

Beth’s journey is really hard to read about. It’s clear early on that she is suffering from anxiety and some sort of eating disorder (she gains a diagnosis late in the book, but I’m not sure the anxiety is ever fully covered). It’s also clear that her boyfriend, Colt, is taking advantage of her. She’s the one who wrote the Grammy-award-winning song, not him, but he is the star, the one who gets the credit, and he is masterful at manipulating her into doing what he wants. (To be fair… she doesn’t *want* to be the star. But nobody seems quite willing to let her stop.)

Honestly, with all the pressure she is under, it’s not surprising that she decides to focus on something she feels she can control.

There are some very sweet moments in her story, and some very empowering ones, but it’s a rough ride. I liked that her story wasn’t a romance, because she really did need to find out who she was and what she needed before a romance could be a healthy possibility – but there are hints of a romance in her future.

As for Amy…poor Amy gets a bit of a rough deal in Alcott’s books, personality-wise. It’s not surprising; the books are written from Jo’s perspective, and while Beth is Jo’s pet, and Meg her close-in-age big sister, Amy is the annoying one who wants attention and destroys Jo’s manuscripts. Amy is the one who knows how to perform charm and femininity, while Jo is described by Alcott as having a ‘gentlemanly demeanour’. They really are set up in opposition from the start.

In Beth and Amy we see this relationship from Amy’s point of view. For Amy, Jo is the clever sister whom she can’t live up to, and the romantic rival whom she can never equal. Amy falls in love with Trey when she is still a child, after he rescues her first from canoes and later from school bullies. He treats her with the casual affection of an older brother, but to Amy he is far more than that. But alas, Jo and Trey are inseparable, and have an on and off romantic relationship. Even after Jo and Eric become a couple, Trey is still hung up on Jo.

Amy is sensible enough to realise that her love for Trey is doomed, but she is also enough in love with Trey to fall into bed with him that night in Paris – a clear breach of the sister code which fills her with shame and guilt, and also makes it clear to her that she needs to walk away. Except that now she is back in Bunyan, and so is Trey, and Jo is happily married to someone else, so…?

I really felt for Amy. She has many abilities, and is both practical and ambitious, but since her skills are in the areas of design and fashion, she tends to devalue them – they are just part of being pretty, and she compares them unfavourably to Jo’s books, which can ‘change the world’. She is an interesting mix of self-confidence and self-doubt, and I have to say, Trey DOES NOT HELP with this.

Trey… oh boy did Trey get on my nerves. Trey really is very much like Laurie in the March books – handsome, good-hearted, charming, and spoiled. He walks through the world with a careless sort of kindness, but he lacks self-reflection and doesn’t really notice either the privileges he has or the impact he has on others. He is devoted to the March women, but in some ways this devotion feels more like a devotion to the idea of their family than to them as individuals. He’s very good at not seeing things.

Honestly, Trey is an extremely well-written character because I could absolutely see why Amy would be in love with him, and there were times I fell for him myself, but mostly I wanted to smack him. He also grows up a fair bit during this book, which is good, because he needs to.

I loved the relationships between all the siblings in this book, especially the relationship between Amy and Beth. We don’t see this relationship in the Alcott books, but they are the closest to each other in age, and it makes sense that they are the two who really notice what is going on in each other’s lives, when the others don’t. There was an interesting younger sibling solidarity between them, even though they are very different people, and don’t seem to talk about the important things to each other. But they notice things about each other that the others do not, and they keep each other’s secrets from the older sisters.

One thing that this book did that I really liked was that very occasionally, it put Alcott’s original words in the characters’ mouths. While I grew up reading the Little Women books, and reread them into my twenties and thirties, I don’t think I know them so well that I caught all the parallels. But from time to time Beth or Amy or Abby would say something and I would recognise it, and it was always a gut punch. The emotional impact was palpable.

Beth and Amy is women’s fiction and a coming-of-age story, not a romance, though there are several romance threads running through the story. There is a lot of pain in the story, and I found it difficult to read at times (though it was also a very sticky book that didn’t want to let me put it down!). But it’s worth sticking with it, because while the story doesn’t quite wrap everything up in a neat bow, everyone does end the book in a better place than where they started it. It is a very hopeful story in many ways, and if it has an overall theme, it seems to be that people can grow and change and heal and become stronger, and that relationships can do so, too. It’s a story that says you don’t have to be defined or confined by just one aspect of your personality, or by your role in the family. You can be the ‘good one’ and still have flaws; you can be the ‘pretty one’ and still be valued for your kindness or your perceptiveness or your ambitions; you can be the practical, understanding, nurturing one and still demand to be nurtured yourself.

But honestly? The thing I loved most about this story was that it gave me a new chapter in the lives of the March sisters. One where John doesn’t die young, and Beth survives and gets to keep making music, and Marmee gets to be Abby March and set the boundaries that women just couldn’t set in the 19th century. I loved the way all of the characters really did feel like the same people I met in Little Women as a child – just transposed to a new era, with new concerns, better medical and care, and more options for the women. I loved getting to know Amy as more than a beautiful cipher and Beth as more than an angel in the house, and I loved seeing Meg happy and un-bereaved, and Jo absolutely thriving in an era that allowed her ambitions more scope.

Beth and Amy really is a wonderful way to revisit the world of Little Women, and I’ll be reading it again for sure.