Book Review: Where Grace Appears

Title: Where Grace Appears

Author: Heidi Chiavaroli

Date: 2021

Publisher: Hope Creek

Quote: "Mom and Dad had the entire Little Women thing going on with our names, but sometimes I wondered if our association to the March family hadn't cursed us...as Amie gravitated to art and Lizzie to music, as I bucked against the urge to write, and even last year as Maggie threw away her marketing career to be a wife and mother."

Would Louisa May Alcott have approved of another writer remaking Little Women as a series of contemporary romances? I'm not sure. Certainly Chiavaroli mentions body parts in a way Alcott valiantly resisted doing, and probably would not appreciate. And the kisses aren't limited to the kind unmarried aunts were supposed to know anything about, in Alcott's day. And her twist on Jo's romance with Professor Bhaer misses the point.

True: Alcott didn't share our quirky modern phobia of age gaps in marriage. The Victorians generally didn't. They knew sex was dangerous, and they didn't know how dangerous or why, but they had a general idea that marriage--something about its being blessed by a clergyman?--made sex a little less dangerous than it otherwise seemed to be. They knew life was uncertain and often short. If people could marry early and have a few children with a spouse who lived long enough for those children to remember, they'd been blessed. In theory that would have produced a general idea that women should look for young husbands who were likely to have more working years left in which they could provide for their children, but in practice the Victorians seemed to feel that women should look for husbands who already had a nice savings account to provide for their widows and fatherless children, which they were so likely to leave behind in any case. 

So...in Little Women John's not all that much older than Meg or even Laurie, but he dies young anyway. Laurie's only a few years ahead of Amy, but Jo keeps him strictly in the friendzone, leaving him to mope until Amy finally grows up enough that he decides he can love her, and they live happily ever after. Jo meets Fritz as an older man who shares her beliefs and defends them in a debate where she doesn't have the formal education to defend them herself; she's thrilled by the idea of becoming his student and assistant for life, so they live happily ever after, too. 

The trouble is that Fritz wasn't drawn from life, Alcott may never have fully visualized what he looked like, and she certainly didn't make him sound attractive. He's older. He's a college professor. He has a funny accent--German, of all things, not even Italian. Whereas Laurie is described as half Italian, but he speaks good English. Alcott said that in real life he was created from her memories of a foreign student (Polish, iirc) who was dark, handsome, clever, witty, and young enough to be her nephew. She met the student after becoming disabled, so there was no romance in real life. She expects readers to believe that Jo feels sisterly about Laurie, too. I can believe it, but many readers can't. They want to believe there's a physical attraction between Jo and Laurie, and none between Jo and Fritz, although a close reading of Alcott's actual words does not support this. For masses of readers, Laurie's the sort of boy they would like, and Fritz is some sort of exchange teacher whose lectures would probably be deadly boring too. 

So in this remake Josie Martin lost a scholarship because her grumpy but generous aunt (Priscilla) read too much into an innocent high school adventure. By way of compensation Aunt Pris sent Josie away to university, where she had a rebellious fling with Finn Becker, a blond European (unspecified) exchange teacher who displays utter unworthiness by suggesting she abort the baby. Josie decides to be a single mother but Tripp, the dark and handsome boy next door who's always been her best friend, wants to marry her, baby and all. But can Josie convince hersef that it's right to burden a good friend in such a way?

Durrr. Contemporary Christian romance. But romance readers savor the details, so here is a nice, somewhat tactile but "tasteful," story of pretty speeches, good behavior, and sizzling kisses. There are sequels, too.