Sharp and subversive, this delightfully messy YA rom-com offers a sly wink to the classic Little Women, as teenage Jo Porter rebels against living in the shadow of her literary namesake.
Lit’s about to hit the fan. Jo Porter has had enough Little Women to last a lifetime. As if being named after the sappiest family in literature wasn’t sufficiently humiliating, Jo’s mom, ahem Marmee, leveled up her Alcott obsession by turning their rambling old house into a sad-sack tourist attraction.
Now Jo, along with her siblings, Meg and Bethamy (yes, that’s two March sisters in one), spends all summer acting out sentimental moments at Little Women Live!, where she can feel her soul slowly dying.
So when a famed photojournalist arrives to document the show, Jo seizes on the glimpse of another life: artsy, worldly, and fast-paced. It doesn’t hurt that the reporter’s teenage son is also eager to get up close and personal with Jo—to the annoyance of her best friend, aka the boy next door (who is definitely not called Laurie). All Jo wants is for someone to see the person behind the prickliness and pinafores.
But when she gets a little too real about her frustration with the family biz, Jo will have to make peace with kitsch and kin before their livelihood suffers a fate worse than Beth.
As a devotee of classic novels, Mary Porter-Malcolm is a walking encyclopedia of Mistakes That Have Been Made, especially by her favorite literary heroines. So when some new friends seem in danger of falling for the same tricks employed since the days of Austen and Tolstoy, Mary starts compiling the Scoundrel Survival Guide, using archetypes of literatures debonair bad boys to spot red flags in the dating department. But despite her best efforts, she soon finds herself falling for a supposed cadthe same one she warned her friends away from. Without a convenient rain-swept moor to flee to, Mary is forced to admit that real life doesnt follow the same rules as fiction and if she wants a happy ending, shes going to have to ditch the books and write it herself.
