By Louisa May Alcott
Four sisters grow up together in a New England town during the Civil War, short on money and missing their father at the front, while their mother holds the household steady.
The four March sisters are growing up in a New England town while the Civil War keeps their father away, serving as an army chaplain. Meg is the oldest and the pretty one. Jo is the fierce, clumsy tomboy who wants to write and flatly refuses to grow up ladylike. Beth is gentle and so shy she can hardly bear to be looked at, happiest at her piano. And Amy is the vain little one who longs for beautiful things. Their mother, Marmee, keeps the house running on very little, and the girls fill it right up: putting on plays, quarreling and making up, pulling the rich boy next door, Laurie, in as one of their own, and trying (and failing a great deal) to be good. Most of it is warm and funny and domestic, the small daily business of an ordinary family. But it doesn't look away from the hard things either, from money worries to growing up and apart, to one loss that sits at the center of the whole book.
This is the heaviest book on the trail for the heart, and one of the most rewarding. The prose is nineteenth-century, with long sentences, a fair amount of gentle sermonizing, and a narrator who steps in now and then to comment, so it asks for a patient, fluent reader, or a family reading it out loud together. What pulls a modern child through is Jo. She's as stubborn and real and frustrated as any girl in fiction, and around her is a family you slowly come to feel you belong to. By the end your child will have spent years alongside these sisters, and felt what those years cost them.