The Spring Girls A Modern-Day Retelling of Little Women

A special thank you goes out to Netgalley, Gallery books, and Simon and Schuster for allowing me to read this early. All thoughts and opinions are my own. You guys don't understand how excited I was and still am for this book! It's a modern retelling of Little Women! How much more awesome can that get! I don't really talk about classics a lot because I haven't read a lot and I don't want to sound uneducated. But I adore Little Women, even if I haven't completed the entire series yet. It was one of the very first classics that I ever read and truly understand. I bonded with the March girls, especially my dear sweet Beth in a way that I haven't since Harry Potter. This book was essentially spot on with original with a few extra things, like characters, added in there to keep it fresh. The March girls are renamed the Spring girls but they still have the same first names. Anna Todd captured Meg, Jo, Beth and Amy in a way that was true to the classic but still kept it modern. Everything was basically modernized and I loved it! There were even side characters such as Laurie and John Brooke. There stories were a little bit different than what happened in the classic but I still liked them. They added to the story in positive ways. This is more a character driven book then a plot driven book. We follow the Spring girls as they live their life in a military base in New Orleans while their dad serves. I found that having it more character driven really made this story extra special. Although for a while there, I wasn't sure how it was going to end. But I was satisfied with how it turned out. If I could have one teeny tiny complaint that isn't really a complaint, it would be that I wish all four of the Springs girls got a POV. We had one chapter from the mom, mostly Jo and Meg with some of Beth and one from Amy. I would have loved to see all the girls get equal time on the page. But that is more a personal preference than an actual complaint. If you guys loved the original Little Women then I highly suggest you guys pick this book up right now! I think you all will love this modern retelling. I know I did! You won't be disappointed.

I read Anna Todd’s After series on the Wattpad platform and was really excited to see her name on this book when I found it in Target. It’s certainly different from the After series in that it isn’t a love story. It’s a feel good story about a bond between four sisters who are “military brats.” They’re coping with their mom’s sudden mental absence while their dad is deployed. There is a little romance sprinkled throughout these pages, but it isn’t the hot, heavy, and passionate writing Anna Todd’s fans are used to. It’s a little confusing throughout the story about how exactly Meg and Shia are connected, but it does clear up toward the end. Jo is a spitfire who is just learning about love. Beth is the anxious one who has taken on the household duties while their mother has seemed to check out. Amy is the naive preteen who is looking to follow in her oldest sister’s footsteps. There’s plenty of drama, but it’s not necessarily a page turner. It’s slow moving, but it does provide a good look into how special the bond is between sisters.

Blog | Twitter | Instagram Nearly all of Anna Todd's books have been a massive miss for me and The Spring Girls is no different. I know, I know, you guys are rolling your eyes at me. It's fine. It's just that I felt that the reason why I couldn't get into this was it felt less like a retelling than it should have. Retellings, the good kind, should feel familiar and unique all at once. This felt cold and hollow. It's a difficult task to take on a classic and I applaud anyone who does so, even if I don't personally connect with it. So while I think Anna Todd took a great risk at this, and many of her longtime fans will appreciate it, this book was not enjoyable for me. If I'm being honest, it felt like Todd simply didn't understand most of the characters as they were in their original form, which led to it being a bit patchy on paper and in the end, it didn't translate well. There's this rushed feeling to it that makes you wonder how much work actually went into it, and if it could have been better if they'd taken a bit more time and care with the original story. Because of this, I was never going to finish reading it. Even though I tried. Objectively speaking, this book is a lot better than After. Maybe it would have stood better on its own, as a work of fiction unrelated to Little Women and edited a bit more thoroughly. I don't know. While I am not going to bash Todd's prose or any of that (compared to many of her contemporaries, and even her previous works, her writing is much more solid) but I will say that this story dragged, seemed out of touch and just didn't work for me. At. All.