Little Women’s March sisters love each other dearly, but they’d be the first to admit that they’re very different people. Likewise, you may be drawn to different types of books depending on who is your favorite March sister. We’ve rounded up a collection of books that embody the personalities and values of Meg, Jo, Beth, and Amy — and (just for fun) Laurie, too! Check out the books and their publishers’ descriptions below.
Meg: The Triumph of Everywoman
Meg March is the most conventional of the sisters, marrying young and settling down into domestic bliss with her husband and several babies. Here are some novels that celebrate the challenges and triumphs of everyday women.
Angels by Marian Keyes
After catching her husband having an affair and being fired from her job, Maggie Walsh suddenly finds her perfectly organized existence has become a perfect mess. She decides, for the first time in her life, to do something daring — and flees to her best friend, Emily, in the faraway wonderland of Los Angeles. In this mecca of tanned, beautiful bodies, unsvelte, uncool Maggie is decidedly a fish out of water. Yet, overnight, she’s mixing with film folk, pitching scripts, even experimenting with sex — and discovering that the end of a marriage is not the end of the world.
Why Meg’s fans will enjoy it: Maggie Walsh Garvin is a regular “Meg,” cautious and well-behaved. But when she discovers her perfect husband is cheating on her, she throws caution to the wind and behaves very badly indeed. You may be surprised with where Maggie ends up in the end.
What Alice Forgot by Liane Moriarty
Alice is 29. She adores sleep, chocolate, and her ramshackle new house. She’s newly engaged to the wonderful Nick and is pregnant with her first baby.
There’s just one problem. All of that was 10 years ago…
Alice has slipped in a step-aerobics class, hit her head and lost a decade. Now she’s a grown-up, bossy mother of three in the middle of a nasty divorce and her beloved sister Elisabeth isn’t speaking to her. This is her life but not as she knows it.
Clearly Alice has made some terrible mistakes. Just how much can happen in a decade?
Can she ever get back to the woman she used to be?
Why Meg’s fans will enjoy it: Alice has three children, a faltering marriage — and a whopping case of amnesia. Basically, she thinks it’s 10 years ago, when life was still good and before everything started falling apart. Alice channels some of Meg’s strongest qualities as she tries to determine what happened and how she can right what once went wrong.
Back When We Were Grownups by Anne Tyler
The woman is Rebecca Davitch, a 53-year-old grandmother. Is she an impostor in her own life? she asks herself. Is it indeed her own life? Or is it someone else’s?
On the surface, Beck, as she is known to the Davitch clan, is outgoing, joyous, a natural celebrator. Giving parties is, after all, her vocation — something she slipped into even before finishing college, when Joe Davitch spotted her at an engagement party in his family’s crumbling nineteenth-century Baltimore row house, where giving parties was the family business. What caught his fancy was that she seemed to be having such a wonderful time. Soon this large-spirited older man, a divorcé with three little girls, swept her into his orbit, and before she knew it she was embracing his extended family plus a child of their own, and hosting endless parties in the ornate, high-ceilinged rooms of The Open Arms.
Now, some 30 years later, after presiding over a disastrous family picnic, Rebecca is caught un-awares by the question of who she really is. How she answers it — how she tries to recover her girlhood self, that dignified grownup she had once been — is the story told in this beguiling, funny, and deeply moving novel.
Why Meg’s fans will enjoy it: Rebecca is the center of her large family, but she can’t shake the feeling that she’s become “the wrong person.” She must come to terms with the role she plays within her family.
Wives and Daughters by Elizabeth Gaskell
Set in English society before the 1832 Reform Bill, Wives and Daughters centers on the story of youthful Molly Gibson, brought up from childhood by her father. When he remarries, a new step-sister enters Molly’s quiet life — loveable, but worldly and troubling, Cynthia. The narrative traces the development of the two girls into womanhood within the gossiping and watchful society of Hollingford.
Why Meg’s fans will enjoy it: In this novel, “good daughter” Molly Gibson risks her reputation and her prospects to help her worldly, self-centered stepsister — something we imagine Meg doing for her own sisters.
Jo: Restlessness, Determination, Adventure
Whether she’s selling her own hair, moving to New York by herself, writing trashy potboilers for serial publication, or turning down a perfectly reasonable proposal of marriage from a boy who loves her desperately, Jo is never one to stick to the beaten path. The women in these books share her restlessness, energy, and love of adventure.
To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
One of the best-loved stories of all time, To Kill a Mockingbird has been translated into more than 40 languages, sold more than 30 million copies worldwide, served as the basis for an enormously popular motion picture, and was voted one of the best novels of the twentieth century by librarians across the country. A gripping, heart-wrenching, and wholly remarkable tale of coming-of-age in a South poisoned by virulent prejudice, it views a world of great beauty and savage inequities through the eyes of a young girl, as her father — a crusading local lawyer — risks everything to defend a black man unjustly accused of a terrible crime.
Why Jo’s fans will enjoy it: Generations of readers have fallen in love with Scout Finch, the endearing tomboy at the heart of this classic novel. Like Jo, she has a kind heart and a somewhat impulsive nature.
Where’d You Go, Bernadette by Maria Semple
Bernadette Fox is notorious. To her Microsoft-guru husband, she’s a fearlessly opinionated partner; to fellow private-school mothers in Seattle, she’s a disgrace; to design mavens, she’s a revolutionary architect, and to 15-year-old Bee, she is a best friend and, simply, Mom. Then Bernadette disappears. It began when Bee aced her report card and claimed her promised reward: a family trip to Antarctica. But Bernadette’s intensifying allergy to Seattle — and people in general — has made her so agoraphobic that a virtual assistant in India now runs her most basic errands. A trip to the end of the earth is problematic. To find her mother, Bee compiles email messages, official documents, secret correspondence — creating a compulsively readable and touching novel about misplaced genius and a mother and daughter’s role in an absurd world.
Why Jo’s fans will enjoy it: Bernadette Fox is as restless and creative as ever Jo March was, with a similar tendency to let her temper takeover. When Bernadette’s increasingly chaotic life explodes in her face, she up and disappears. It’s up to her daughter to travel to the literal ends of the Earth to bring her home — if she’s willing to return.
Blood Kiss by J.R. Ward
Paradise, blooded daughter of the king’s First Advisor, is ready to break free from the restrictive life of an aristocratic female. Her strategy? Join the Black Dagger Brotherhood’s training center program and learn to fight for herself, think for herself… be herself. It’s a good plan, until everything goes wrong. The schooling is unfathomably difficult, the other recruits feel more like enemies than allies, and it’s very clear that the Brother in charge, Butch O’Neal, a.k.a. the Dhestroyer, is having serious problems in his own life.
And that’s before she falls in love with a fellow classmate. Craeg, a common civilian, is nothing her father would ever want for her, but everything she could ask for in a male. As an act of violence threatens to tear apart the entire program, and the erotic pull between them grows irresistible, Paradise is tested in ways she never anticipated — and left wondering whether she’s strong enough to claim her own power… on the field, and off.
Why Jo’s fans will enjoy it: Paradise, daughter of the First Advisor to Vampire King Wrath, knows she will never be content among the strictures of life among the vampires’ hidebound aristocracy, the glymera. Instead, she decides to join the elite cadre of warriors known as the Black Dagger Brotherhood, where she finds adventure and romance. Her story is told in parallel with that of Marissa, who broke free of the glymera and scandalized everyone by mating with a mere human. Despite the vastly different storylines, these two tough and unconventional heroines will remind readers of Jo.
Wild by Cheryl Strayed
At 22, Cheryl Strayed thought she had lost everything. In the wake of her mother’s death, her family scattered and her own marriage was soon destroyed. Four years later, with nothing more to lose, she made the most impulsive decision of her life. With no experience or training, driven only by blind will, she would hike more than a thousand miles of the Pacific Crest Trail from the Mojave Desert through California and Oregon to Washington State — and she would do it alone. Told with suspense and style, sparkling with warmth and humor, Wild powerfully captures the terrors and pleasures of one young woman forging ahead against all odds on a journey that maddened, strengthened, and ultimately healed her.
Why Jo’s fans will enjoy it: Jo’s peccadillos seem mild enough today. But if she were a modern woman, we can totally see her taking off on a whim to hike the Pacific Crest Trail.
Beth: Weepies and Tearjerkers
If Beth is your favorite, you probably enjoy a good cathartic cry. These books are guaranteed to deliver — in a big way.
The Fault in Our Stars by John Green
Despite the tumor-shrinking medical miracle that has bought her a few years, Hazel has never been anything but terminal, her final chapter inscribed upon diagnosis. But when a gorgeous plot twist named Augustus Waters suddenly appears at Cancer Kid Support Group, Hazel’s story is about to be completely rewritten.
Why Beth’s fans will enjoy it: The star-crossed romance between cancer patient Hazel Lancaster and cancer survivor Augustus Waters will rip your heart out of your chest, shatter it, and dance a jig on the pieces.
Me Before You by Jojo Moyes
They had nothing in common until love gave them everything to lose…
Louisa Clark is an ordinary girl living an exceedingly ordinary life — steady boyfriend, close family — who has barely been farther afield than their tiny village. She takes a badly needed job working for ex–Master of the Universe Will Traynor, who is wheelchair bound after an accident. Will has always lived a huge life — big deals, extreme sports, worldwide travel — and now he’s pretty sure he cannot live the way he is.
Will is acerbic, moody, bossy — but Lou refuses to treat him with kid gloves, and soon his happiness means more to her than she expected. When she learns that Will has shocking plans of his own, she sets out to show him that life is still worth living.
Why Beth’s fans will enjoy it: The devastating romance between an aimless young woman and a quadriplegic overachiever demonstrates that love isn’t always enough.
A Walk to Remember by Nicholas Sparks
There was a time when the world was sweeter… when the women in Beaufort, North Carolina, wore dresses, and the men donned hats… Every April, when the wind smells of both the sea and lilacs, Landon Carter remembers 1958, his last year at Beaufort High. Landon had dated a girl or two, and even once sworn that he’d been in love. Certainly the last person he thought he’d fall for was Jamie, the shy, almost ethereal daughter of the town’s Baptist minister… Jamie, who was destined to show him the depths of the human heart — and the joy and pain of living. The inspiration for this novel came from Nicholas Sparks’s sister: her life and her courage. From the internationally bestselling author Nicholas Sparks, comes his most moving story yet…
Why Beth’s fans will enjoy it: “Nicholas Sparks” and “tear-jerker” are pretty much synonymous, but the author really poured himself into this story of teenaged Landon Carter and sweet, shy preacher’s daughter Jamie Sullivan. The fact that Sparks was inspired by the life of his own sister makes this novel all the more poignant, and a perfect read for Beth’s fans.
Mrs. Mike by Benedict and Nancy Freedman
Mrs. Mike is a love story, a true story; the story of Katherine Mary O’Fallon, a 16 year-old Irish girl from Boston, and Sergeant Mike Flannigan of the Canadian Mounted Police who meet at her uncle’s ranch in Alberta, Canada where she is sent to recover from pleurisy. They meet, they court, they marry and, following Mike’s orders, move to Hudson’s Hope far into the interior of Alberta.
But it is more than a love story between two people: it is also a love story of the land and animals, of the beavers and the ice, the northern lights and the fires, of whooping cough and whiskey running. It is a love story of the First Peoples and their struggles, the immigrants and their hopes and all the people who came and went through Mike and Kathy’s lives.
Why Beth’s fans will enjoy it: Sure, this classic tale of a big-city girl who marries a Mountie and settles in the Alberta wilderness is fun and romantic… at first. Prepare to be gutted, though, when the diphtheria epidemic hits town.
Amy: Fortune’s Favorite
Amy gets a bad rap, but she’s not a bad person. She just likes money, that’s all. These books are all about women who win, lose, marry into, or live amidst unimaginable wealth.
A Woman of Substance by Barbara Taylor Bradford
From the servants’ quarters of a manor house on the brooding Yorkshire moors to the helm of a profitable international business, Emma Harte’s life is a sweeping saga of unbreakable spirit and resolve. Rising from abject poverty to glittering wealth at the upper echelons of society, there is only one man the indomitable Emma cannot have — and only one she yearns for. The novel was also the subject of a popular 1984 miniseries starring Jenny Seagrove and Deborah Kerr.
Why Amy’s fans will enjoy it: The story of Emma Harte, born into dire poverty but fated to become fabulously wealthy, will please fans of old-school romance, family sagas, and novels about women who aren’t afraid to seize their own destinies — in business, life, and love.
The Royal We by Heather Cocks and Jessica Morgan
American Bex Porter was never one for fairy tales. Her twin sister Lacey was always the romantic, the one who daydreamed of being a princess, but it’s adventure-seeking Bex who goes to Oxford and meets dreamy Nick across the hall — and Bex who finds herself accidentally in love with the heir to the British throne. Nick is wonderful, but he comes with unimaginable baggage: a complicated family, hysterical tabloids tracking his every move, and a public that expected its future king to marry a Brit. On the eve of the most talked-about wedding of the century, Bex looks back on how much she’s had to give up for true love… and exactly whose heart she may yet have to break.
Why Amy’s fans will enjoy it: Bex, an unassuming American exchange student, falls hard for the Crown Prince of England. Although Amy ended up happily paired with Laurie, one senses she would have been right at home in Cocks and Morgan’s sparkling, royal world.
Primates of Park Avenue by Wednesday Martin, Ph.D.
When Wednesday Martin first arrives on New York City’s Upper East Side, she’s clueless about the right addresses, the right wardrobe, and the right schools, and she’s taken aback by the glamorous, sharp-elbowed mommies around her. She feels hazed and unwelcome until she begins to look at her new niche through the lens of her academic background in anthropology. As she analyzes the tribe’s mating and migration patterns, childrearing practices, fetish objects, physical adornment practices, magical purifying rituals, bonding rites, and odd realities like sex segregation, she finds it easier to fit in and even enjoy her new life. Then one day, Wednesday’s world is turned upside down, and she finds out there’s much more to the women who she’s secretly been calling Manhattan Geishas.
Why Amy’s fans will enjoy it: Wednesday Martin moved to Manhattan’s glitzy Upper East Side with her family and immediately realized that she was a stranger in a strange land — the culture, rituals, and customs of the “Manhattan Geishas” that surrounded her were completely foreign to her. Like any good anthropologist, she began to analyze her new neighbors’ behaviors. The resulting books is an insider’s view of how the one percent lives their lives.
A Little Princess by Frances Hodgson Burnett
Written by British-born author Frances Hodgson Burnett and first published in 1905, A Little Princess tells the story of young Sara Crewe, privileged daughter of a wealthy diamond merchant. All the other girls at Miss Minchin’s school treat Sara as if she truly were a princess. But when Captain Crewe’s fortune is sadly lost, Sara’s luck changes. Suddenly she is treated no better than a scullery maid. Her own fierce determination to maintain her dignity and remain a princess inside has intrigued and delighted readers for almost 100 years, even inspiring a recent popular feature film.
Why Amy’s fans will enjoy it: A poor, mistreated little girl triumphs over her circumstances and ends up rich beyond imagination — a theme that would surely have resonated with Amy and will surely appeal to her fans.
Laurie: Life in the Friend Zone
Fan favorite Laurie is best known for his unrequited love for Jo. For those times when you’re fuming about Jo’s pigheaded stupidity in rejecting him, here are some books featuring unrequited lovers, some of whom finally get what they want, while others… not so much.
The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins
In the ruins of a place once known as North America lies the nation of Panem, a shining Capitol surrounded by twelve outlying districts. The Capitol is harsh and cruel and keeps the districts in line by forcing them all to send one boy and one girl between the ages of twelve and eighteen to participate in the annual Hunger Games, a fight to the death on live TV. Sixteen-year-old Katniss Everdeen, who lives alone with her mother and younger sister, regards it as a death sentence when she is forced to represent her district in the Games. But Katniss has been close to dead and survival, for her, is second nature. Without really meaning to, she becomes a contender. But if she is to win, she will have to start making choices that weigh survival against humanity and life against love.
Why Laurie’s fans will enjoy it: When Katniss Everdeen bravely takes her sister’s place in the Hunger Games, she carries with her the love of two very different young men: her co-Tribute Peeta Mellark and her best friend Gale Hawthorne. She fakes a romance with Peeta, but really, she has neither the time nor the inclination for all of that love stuff. The love triangle is merely a subplot in the series, but then again, so is Laurie’s passion for Jo.
The Bingo Palace by Louise Erdrich
At the crossroads of his life, Lipsha Morrissey is summoned by his grandmother to return to the reservation. There, he falls in love for the very first time — with the beautiful Shawnee Ray, who’s already considering a marriage proposal from Lipsha’s wealthy entrepreneurial boss, Lyman Lamartine. But when all efforts to win Shawnee’s affections go hopelessly awry, Lipsha seeks out his great-grandmother for a magical solution to his romantic dilemma — on sacred ground where a federally sanctioned bingo palace is slated for construction.
Why Laurie’s fans will enjoy it: Directionless young Lipsha Morrissey returns home to the reservation and immediately falls in love with the lovely Shawnee Ray. But Shawnee is already involved with a rich man, and Lipsha finds himself going to unimagined lengths to try to win her heart.
Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen
In this historic romance, young Elizabeth Bennet strives for love, independence and honesty in the vapid high society of 19th-century England.
Why Laurie’s fans will enjoy it: Imagine a conversation between Fitzwilliam Darcy and Theodore “Laurie” Laurence:
Laurie: The woman I love rejected me!
Darcy: Hmm. When the woman I loved rejected me — and she wasn’t very nice about it, either — I took it upon myself to buy her family’s way out of a truly massive scandal, without telling her about it and with no actual hope of recompense or thanks. [Boom] [Mic drop]
Laurie: -ooOoo-
The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald
The exemplary novel of the Jazz Age, F. Scott Fitzgeralds’ third book, The Great Gatsby (1925), stands as the supreme achievement of his career. T. S. Eliot read it three times and saw it as the “first step” American fiction had taken since Henry James; H. L. Mencken praised “the charm and beauty of the writing,” as well as Fitzgerald’s sharp social sense; and Thomas Wolfe hailed it as Fitzgerald’s “best work” thus far. The story of the fabulously wealthy Jay Gatsby and his love for the beautiful Daisy Buchanan, of lavish parties on Long Island at a time when, the New York Times remarked, “gin was the national drink and sex the national obsession,” it is an exquisitely crafted tale of America in the 1920s that resonates with the power of myth. A novel of lyrical beauty yet brutal realism, of magic, romance, and mysticism, The Great Gatsby is one of the great classics of 20th-century literature.
Why Laurie’s fans will enjoy it: Meet Jay Gatsby, Lord Mayor of the Friend Zone. He uses his ill-gotten fortune to reinvent himself entirely, buys a mansion he doesn’t really need, and throws huge blowout parties just to get the attention of another man’s wife. And is the object of his affections — shallow, cold-hearted Daisy Buchanan — worth all of this kerfuffle? Absolutely not. Good for those days when you’re feeling particularly bitter about your unrequited love.
Which ones will you read? Tell us in the comments!
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