What’s behind the “ nunya bidness door”? And is that a gun sticking out from Grandpop’s waistband? Reynolds’ middle-grade debut meanders like the best kind of summer vacation but never loses sense of its throughline. And he and Ernie will have to do chores, like picking peas and scooping dog poop.
Then, he breaks the model truck that’s one of the only things Grandma still has of his deceased uncle.
Next, there’s no Internet, so the questions he keeps track of in his notebook (over 400 so far) will have to go un-Googled. 9-12)Įleven-year-old Brooklynite Genie has “worry issues,” so when he and his older brother, Ernie, are sent to Virginia to spend a month with their estranged grandparents while their parents “try to figure it all out,” he goes into overdrive.įirst, he discovers that Grandpop is blind. This retelling of Little Women may indeed attract today’s readers to the original, but why not just give them that instead? (Fiction. However, Schaefer’s version, though jazzed-up with references to modern kids’ books, recipes, and craft projects, pales in comparison with Alcott’s classic. Aside from Alcott’s Civil War setting, Schaefer’s plot neatly parallels events in Little Women with modern accoutrements such as video games, cellphones, hoodies, and jeans. Although three years younger than their originals, Schaefer’s sisters mirror Alcott’s in appearance and temperament. Throughout, the sisters are guided by their mother’s moral compass. March is injured and Beth contracts the flu. Amy’s impetuousness earns her detention and Jo’s wrath. Meg tries “to set a good example and…keep her sisters in line.” Jo writes in her attic lair, plays hockey, and befriends olive-skinned neighbor Laurie. Motherly, occasionally bossy Meg (13), temperamental, no-nonsense Jo (12), quiet, shy Beth (10), and effervescent, artistic Amy (9) live with their mother, a community-center director, and her friend Hannah while their father’s serving overseas. The white March sisters experience family life in a New England town in this “modern retelling” of Part 1 of Little Women.
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