Little Women and Me (39 page)
Read Little Women and Me Online
Authors: Lauren Baratz-Logsted
“It’s a fine piece of writing, Emily, and under normal circumstances I would give you an A. But I can’t even grade this paper. You’ll have to do it over again.”
“
What?
Why?”
“Because you obviously haven’t read the book. Or if you did, you never finished it.”
“What are you talking about?”
What is he talking about? Never even read the book? I feel like I practically
lived
that book!
“You say right here that Laurie winds up with Amy in the end,” he says. “But that’s wrong. If you’d bothered to finish
Little Women
, you’d remember that Laurie winds up with Jo.”
“No, he doesn’t,” I insist.
“Yes, he does.” Mr. Ochocinco swivels his chair, plucks a
volume from the bookcase behind him. Turning, he hands me a copy of
Little Women
, the same volume I have with the woodcut illustrations.
“See for yourself,” he says. “Turn to the last chapter where the three remaining sisters are picnicking with their families.”
See for myself. See for himself! Is this man on drugs? I’ll show him, I think, paging through the book.
I quickly scan the text.
Wait a second here. I don’t even see Professor Bhaer’s name mentioned. But that’s Jo’s husband!
I scan through again.
There’s something about Meg and John and their kids. Next Jo’s name is linked with Laurie’s. And Amy—her name is linked with someone I’ve never even heard of before.
I study the final woodcut at the end of the book, a scene that depicts the three remaining girls clearly paired off with their spouses: Meg and John; Jo and Laurie; Amy with some other guy. Wait a second. Instinctively, I know that guy—he’s the redhaired guy that Jo didn’t want to dance with one time at a party!
I’ll tell you one thing. In that picture, Amy does
not
look happy. In fact, she almost looks as though she’s scowling directly at me.
I hand him back the book, stunned.
“So you see, Emily,” he says, “you’ll just have to rewrite your paper. Choose something else to change about
Little Women
. Or better yet, choose another book, preferably one you know better.”
“Yes, I do see,” I say vaguely.
I can’t believe this. OMG, did
I
change
Little Women
? Did everything I thought was a dream really happen?
Still feeling dazed, I head toward the door.
“Emily?” Mr. Ochocinco calls after me.
I turn.
“You dropped something from your notebook,” he says. Bending, he picks something up from the ground, hands it to me.
I look at the thing in my hand. It’s a paper crown, with the initials “P.C.” on it.
The Pickwick Club
, I mouth the words silently.
But how …?
OMG, it all really did happen. I
lived
in
Little Women
, and I changed the ending!
As I close the door to Mr. Ochocinco’s room behind me, I see Jackson and Charlotte pass by in the hallway, holding hands.
After I told Charlotte about Jackson liking her on Friday night, and after we finished eating dinner, she got up the nerve to call him while I worked on my paper—the paper I’ll now have to rewrite.
Oh, well.
So Jo wound up with Laurie, and Charlotte is winding up with Jackson. Me, I wound up with neither Jackson nor Laurie. But that’s as it should be. It’s the way the story was always meant to go. Someday, I’ll have my own guy. He won’t be either Jackson or Laurie. He’ll be some guy I genuinely like for who he is, and who likes me for who I am.
I have
got
to find Kendra—I
need
to tell her everything that’s happened!
But then I realize: I’ll never be able to tell anyone what’s happened to me, what I’ve seen, where I’ve been, and how I changed the story even as it changed me—who would ever believe me?
And suddenly I miss my family, my
other
family: starchy Meg, annoying Jo, sweet Beth, and even Amy, the interloper.
I finger the paper crown in my hand as words come to me, words that I instinctively know are the last bit of dialogue Beth speaks before she dies, saying, “… for love is the only thing we can carry with us when we go; and it makes the end so easy.”
Yes, Beth
, I think.
Yes, it does.
Thanks to Pamela Harty and everyone at The Knight Agency for superior representation.
Thanks to Melanie Cecka and everyone at Bloomsbury USA for superior publishing.
Thanks to writers who helped this particular book on its way—Lauren Catherine, Andrea Schicke Hirsch, Greg Logsted, and Rob Mayette—for superior help.
Thanks to Lucille Baratz for being a superior mother, Greg Logsted for being a superior husband, and Jackie Logsted for being the most superior of daughters.
Thanks to booksellers, librarians, and readers everywhere—superlative beings, one and all.
[Author’s Note about the Author’s Note: Please don’t read this if you haven’t finished the book!]
When I was younger, I read
Little Women
more times than I can count. I loved the world Louisa May Alcott created, although I did have two major issues with it: I always hated it when Beth died, and I really hated that Laurie wound up with Amy instead of the person I’d have him end up with if I were in charge of the world, Jo. There are some books you first encounter when you’re younger—
Jane Eyre
and
The Great Gatsby
immediately spring to mind—that you read again as you get older, but
Little Women
had never been that way for me. Once I reached a certain age, it became a book I no longer reread, the Marches existing instead in fond memory and movie adaptations.
But then, a few years ago, my daughter, Jackie, and her best
friend discovered
Little Women
for the first time, and I began really thinking about the book once more. We discussed how sad it is that Beth dies, how even Joey on
Friends
is so upset about it that he makes Rachel hide the book in the freezer! And we discussed how wrong we all thought it was that Laurie winds up with Amy instead of Jo.
That’s when I had the kind of moment that drives so much of my writing:
What if?
In this case, what if a contemporary teen somehow found herself inside the world of
Little Women
, her mission there being to change one of the two problems readers traditionally have with the book? So I sat down and wrote the prologue to
Little Women and Me
, in which Emily is literally sucked into the story. And then I pulled out a copy of
Little Women
and set about writing the rest of my book.
Normally, when writing a book, I might do all of my research first, which in this case would have meant rereading all of
Little Women
before writing my own version. But I didn’t do that. Instead, I’d read one chapter of Alcott’s book and then write my own version, keeping the plot points and whatever else I wanted from hers, while inserting Emily into the story and adding my own twists. This chapter-by-chapter correspondence goes on through
Chapter 30
. Alcott’s
Little Women
continues for another seventeen chapters while my version veers off there into the epilogue. I leave the story before Beth dies, although the reader now knows that eventually she will, that no matter what Emily did, she couldn’t stop that.
Here’s the most surprising thing I found while rereading
Little Women
, something I never noticed when I was younger, but that Emily comments on several times during her journey through the book—it’s all so random! Sure, there’s a plotline,
but family members and friends and even events enter the story from out of the blue, like the meeting of the Pickwick Club. The March sisters have been seemingly meeting regularly to put together their own newspaper, but no mention is made of the club before or after the chapter in which that one meeting takes place.
So if readers of my book occasionally think, “Wow! That thing that just happened was so random!” chances are the original book was random first.
One thing that may surprise readers is how I came up with the ending. Most of the time when I write a book, I know how it’s going to end practically from the beginning. Not so with
Little Women and Me
. Louisa May Alcott wrote her book in episodic fashion, and so it was with me and mine. But about two-thirds of the way through, I had one of those epiphanies that sometimes happen while writing a book, and I realized: Whoa! Emily’s not the only time traveler in the book—Amy’s a time traveler too … and Papa! That’s when I knew how the book would end: Emily and Amy would confront each other, and eventually Emily would “fix” the story, making it so that Jo would wind up with Laurie, thereby earning her way back to her own life.
It was while I was writing the epilogue that another moment of inspiration struck. Earlier, I mentioned the Pickwick Club. In my chapter about that unusual writing society, just as in the original version, the March sisters wear badges with the initials “P.C.” on them wrapped around their heads like crowns. There’s a great book on writing by Christopher Vogler called
The Writer’s Journey
. It primarily discusses writing for film, but a lot of it can be used for writing novels as well. It breaks down a story’s
structure into twelve parts, and one of the parts near the end is called “the return with the elixir”—think of the elixir as some tangible item that the hero or heroine brings back like a reward for their successful journey or, in Emily’s case, proof that the journey even happened. In the epilogue, after Emily talks to her teacher about her paper, she’s still stunned by everything that’s happened, still unsure if it was all a dream or if it was real. Then the paper crown with “P.C.” on it falls out of her notebook—the elixir Emily didn’t know she brought back with her—and the truth finally hits: she time traveled into
Little Women
and she changed the ending.
I hope you enjoyed
Little Women and Me
even half as much as I enjoyed writing it. Thanks for reading!
The Twin’s Daughter
Copyright © 2011 by Lauren Baratz-Logsted
First published in the United States of America in November 2011
by Bloomsbury Books for Young Readers
www.bloomsburyteens.com
Electronic edition published in 2011
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.
For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to
Permissions, Bloomsbury BFYR, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, New York 10010
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Baratz-Logsted, Lauren.
Little Women and me / by Lauren Baratz-Logsted — 1st U.S. ed.
p. cm.
Summary: Modern-day teen Emily March turns to Louisa May Alcott’s famous book for a school
assignment and finds herself mysteriously transported to the world of
Little Women
, where she
undergoes surprising changes.
eISBN: 978-1-59990-514-3 (ebook)
[1. Space and time—Fiction. 2. Sisters—Fiction. 3. Family life—New England—Fiction. 4. Conduct of
life—Fiction. 5. New England—History—19th century—Fiction.]
I. Alcott, Louisa May, 1832–1888. Little women. II. Title.
PZ7.B22966Lit 2011 [Fic]—dc22 2010038095
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