A Hopeful Heart

August 31, 2020
This well-researched account of Louisa May Alcott’s amply documented life is differentiated by Noyes’s emphasis on the toxicity of Bronson Alcott’s Transcendental beliefs, Abby Alcott’s frustration and resourcefulness, and their family commitment to abolitionism. Direct quotes from primary sources depict the idealism-induced instability of Alcott’s socially privileged but impoverished youth—friends with luminaries including Thoreau and Emerson, but “poor as rats” due to her father’s unwillingness to earn a living. Buffeted by her turbulent family, Alcott stepped up to provide. Ironically, Little Women, a book she reluctantly wrote and which transmuted her flawed family into the idealized Marches, finally won Alcott “the fortune and fame she had craved.” Though Noyes’s adroit biography covers key details, Alcott is overshadowed by her charismatic parents, while her fictional alter ego, Jo March, remains the benchmark for insights into the author’s heart. Final art not seen by PW. Ages 8–12.

September 1, 2020

Gr 7 Up-While most readers imagine Louisa May Alcott's life story to be largely identical to her autobiographical novel, Noyes's well-researched biography reveals a fascinating journey in the decades prior to the publication of Little Women. Her family moved dozens of times. They followed Alcott's eccentric father, Bronson, on his failed quests as an education reformer, philosopher, and Utopian commune founder. Her parents' involvement in intellectual circles allowed Alcott and her sisters to rub elbows with thinkers such as Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, and Nathaniel Hawthorne and participate in the abolitionist movement and Underground Railroad. While Noyes offers detailed descriptions of each of the family members, the chronological narrative focuses on Alcott's independent spirit and how she later provided financial support for her family through teaching, working as an army nurse, and writing. This book will appeal to any reader familiar with Little Women; the text shares insight into the family dynamics, misadventures, and love interests that found their way into the novel. Readers with a strong background in American literature will fully appreciate the notable friendships of the Alcott family, which included prominent American writers and philosophers. VERDICT A valuable addition to biography collections, especially where author studies are in demand.-Kelly Jahng, South Park Elem. Sch., IL

Copyright 2020 School Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

September 1, 2020
From birth to fame, a versatile writer's growth, education, travels, and early influences. Louisa May Alcott led a copiously well-documented life--her own journals, begun at age 8, were preceded by her father Bronson's record of his young daughters' antics that ultimately ran to 2,500 pages. Here Noyes falls victim to that weight of available detail, embedding valuable insights into Bronson's pedagogical methods (well ahead of their time), Alcott's independent spirit, and the Alcott family's connections with leading intellectual lights of the day in tedious references to neighbors, boarders, debts and payments, travel arrangements, and quotidian comings and goings. The generally penniless Alcotts changed addresses over 30 times in Alcott's first 20-some years, for example, and if the author doesn't mention each and every move, readers will still feel as if she has. She also, disappointingly, shows more interest in detailing what Alcott was paid for her potboilers than in describing what they were about and takes at best cursory notice of the themes or plotlines of her early novels The Inheritance and Moods. On the other hand, Alcott's experiences nursing dying Civil War soldiers in a Washington hospital make a vivid and heart-rending lead-up to a climactic account of the genesis of Little Women, and readers who have fallen under that novel's spell will at least come away with a clear picture of its author's maverick nature. A perceptive character study afflicted with excess and inconsequential detail. (bibliography, endnotes) (Biography. 12-15)

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