I finally watched the 2019 version of Little Women and we have to talk about it

+ a look back at my April/May reading, and some book recs for Pride Month!

Jun 01, 2025

First off, if you’re new, here, hi!! Welcome to Sharanya’s Shelf: a newsletter in which a South Asian writer, educator, and lifelong story-obsessed creative shares her love of stories with you!

Want more info on who I am and/or what to expect from this newsletter? Check out my about page, or my welcome post. I’m so glad you’re here! I hope you stick around. Now let’s talk books!

Happy June, my friends! It’s been a minute, hasn’t it?!

Sorry I’ve been so rather quiet on here. April was a thoroughly uninspiring month, and then May turned into a WHIRLWIND of family obligations. And too, I’m still trying to figure out how best to keep a steady schedule with this substack that feels sustainable, while still fostering that connection with you. It’s a work in progress, so it’s messy, and rather uneven at the moment, and I’m extra grateful to the folks that have stuck with me this far!

While April was a bit of a dud month on my bookshelf, May was pretty fun! Here are some thoughts on my top two books from this spring:

The Mayor of Maxwell Street, by Avery Cunningham

This was a solid 3.5 star — not bad at all! But I wanted to like this so much more than I did. Things I liked: a riveting setting — 1920s Chicago, a time when Prohibition was in full swing, Jim Crow held folks in its iron grip, and people from all over the world churned & toiled and tried to keep their head above the tide in America’s great Melting Pot. Also, GREAT writing — full of rich, descriptive prose and complex characterization. Honestly, I think the problem was more of a marketing issue than anything else. This was marketed as a star-crossed, possibly tragic, long-enduring tale of Epic Love between Nelly Sawyer, a young Black journalist, and Jay, a biracial speakeasy manager, as they work together to expose a gangster known only as The Mayor of Maxwell Street. What I got was…not that. In fact, one of the main themes of the story is that love stories that seem “epic” can actually be really toxic and hinder your growth as a person. Which is a great theme, sure, but not what I came for.

Iron Widow, by Xiran Jay Zhao

Ok, people WERE NOT KIDDING when they told me to strap in for this!!! The futuristic world building made my brain work extra hard, but that’s not a bad thing. There is such care and depth of knowledge in the way Zhao uses qì as the basis of the magic system and how different elements within each person interact, and it makes the action sequences feel so REAL and lived in! But what really carries the story is the indomitable Wu Zetian, an absolute icon of femme/gender nonconforming rage. Her voice is SO distinct, funny, and poignant all at the same time, and the narration just sizzles from it. She’s definitely going to go into my Top 5 Heroines hall of fame. And the romance…it’s equal parts cute & tender, and does a great job of challenging perceptions about gender dynamics, which is great. And, it kind of made me reflect on the premise of love triangles. I have some thoughts percolating on that, which you might see in a future newsletter, maybe!

If asked, I would say I am a Jo sun and an Amy rising (& probably a Beth moon). My soul is all about that wild, creative spark but my outer self craves to be cherished and understood, while my inner world loves staying home. I grew up reading Little Women and watching the 1994 adaptation, seeing myself in each of the four March sisters. And now that I’ve watched the 2019 version of Little Women, we most definitely have to talk about it.

I know, I know, but it took me this long because I have mixed feelings about Greta Gerwig’s work. But, there was actually lot there I loved! Jo’s heart-wrenching speech about love & loneliness. Her plea for Beth to fight. Saoirse Ronan is ✨RIVETING✨, my god. And too, the way we saw these raw, stormy, tender moments of sisterhood in the ~flashback~ scenes. I think Gerwig beautifully captures the kind of hurricane-like energy that can come with growing up with sisters/siblings and how you are in tune to each other in a way you will be with no one else. Every moment where Amy calls Laurie out on his bullshit, while being unapologetic about herself (more women being unapologetic about the “unlikeable” parts of themselves, please!!). AND, I absolutely LOVE how Gerwig reminds us in the end that Louisa May Alcott wanted Jo to remain unmarried, but had to “bow to the economic proposition of marriage” in her books in order to publish. So excellent!!

Some things that didn’t work for me: the structure of this version — the back & forth between past and present — drove me mad. The whole point of Little Women is that it is a coming-of-age story. I felt rather robbed of the arc of that journey, and the deeply resonant emotions it’s supposed to wreak, because I was so disoriented and constantly trying to situate myself in the timeline. Also, I really missed young!Amy from the 1994 version. Kirsten Dunst’s portrayal of her is so excellent, and while I LOVED Florence Pugh’s portrayal of adult!Amy, she simply didn’t get there as the 12-year-old version. Though I think that also has a lot to do with the dialogue — young!Amy’s dialogue in the 1994 version is just spectacular — precocious & funny but full of sudden wisdoms that turn the scene just so. In this version it was clear that the script leaned much more heavily towards the adult characters than their childhood selves, for better and for worse.

But I had one major annoyance, and that is the Jo/Laurie thing. Oh boy, the Jo/Laurie thing.

Probably my most unpopular bookish opinion is that I do not think Jo/Laurie should have been a couple. Listen. Listen. Jo is ABSOLUTELY CORRECT when she tells Teddy they would argue all the time & resent each other & eventually drive each other insane.

Theodore Laurence is a rich white man who comes from a long line of rich white men, all of whom made the family fortune by telling other people what to do and getting their way in the world with very little resistance. As such, I doubt “compromise” is really in Laurie’s vocabulary. The minute Jo became his wife, he would have expected Jo to be The Wife first, and The Writer second. Meanwhile, Jo is Jo — a wildly passionate, free-spirited creature of creativity and spark, who puts her whole soul into her writing and believes that is her highest calling in life. To her, being The Writer comes first, last, and always. And the thing is, they’re both just wild & passionate enough to want to change the other person to bend to their will & lifestyle, but then it would have all gone to shit when neither of them would have been willing to compromise on their character or their dreams.

And, you know, I think it’s a remarkable thing, what Louisa May Alcott did. For a female character in a novel published in 1869 to know her own mind, to be SO SURE of herself that she has the foresight and courage to say no to what seems like a good thing, because she knows it isn’t right for her? Absolutely mind-blowing. A trailblazing moment in feminist literature.

This is why the Jo & Laurie discourse annoys me sometimes. So many folks are just a wee bit too eager to invalidate Jo’s agency just because Laurie is charismatic & he has great chemistry with Jo or whatever. Hotness & chemistry do not a lasting, lifelong partnership make. Louisa, & Jo, knew this. So yes, it annoyed me so much when Jo appears to kind of sort of almost change her mind about saying no to Laurie in Gerwig’s version. WTF?!?!

And to be clear, it’s not the absolutely heart-rending speech she gives Marmee after returning home from New York. That speech! God, that speech. I LOVED that speech. The moment Jo says “but I’m so lonely” reverberated all throughout my bones. It was raw and weighted and so full of something I’m convinced every modern woman has felt at some point in her life, wondering if things would be better if she’d taken the road not chosen. It was beautiful. And if we had left it at that, as a fleeting, but still real, moment of weakness, it would be wonderful. I’d have no complaints there.

Alas, we didn’t leave it at that. Instead, from that moment on Gerwig decided to provide us with an unnecessary level of Jo/Laurie fan service that undermines Jo’s character.

First there was Jo writing Laurie a whole-ass letter about how she “regrets her choice” and if he asked again she would say yes. First of all, not only does this not happen in the book but in fact it’s the exact opposite. In the novel, Laurie writes to Jo from France “telling her that he could not settle anything while there was the least hope of changing her mind. Couldn’t she, wouldn’t she, and let him come home and be happy?” And Jo’s response is that she “decidedly couldn’t, and wouldn’t.” And then she “begged him to be happy with somebody else, but always keep a little corner of his heart for his loving sister Jo.”

Again, it’s such a wonderfully refreshing thing to see a woman — again, in a novel written in 1869, mind you! — stand firm in her self-knowledge! So the way Gerwig inverts that left a really sour taste in my mouth. Especially given that it’s only after Jo learns about Laurie’s marriage to Amy that Jo runs out to their secret letterbox and takes the letter out, which implies that Jo’s regret never really goes away. Ew!

This is again implied when she and Amy talk after. In the novel, Jo feels a little sad / awkward that the relationship between her and Laurie is changing from besties to in-laws. And, to me at least, it’s made pretty clear that Jo doesn’t have regrets, just an ephemeral ache at the vagaries of life. Regardless of how she feels about the change between her and Laurie, though, it in absolutely no way bleeds into her relationship with Amy at that point. Meanwhile, in Gerwig’s version, when Amy asks Jo if she’s angry about the marriage, Jo responds with a strained smile and, “Life’s too short to be angry with sisters.”

Granted, this is right after Beth’s passing so some of the strain can be attributed to that. But then to say “Life’s too short to be angry with sisters.” Excuse the fuck out of me?! I almost threw my iPad away. The implication there is that Amy has done something worthy of Jo’s anger (i.e. “taking” Laurie away as a romantic partner), but that Jo is magnanimously choosing to overlook Amy’s ~selfish faux pas~ because of what they’ve just endured. It’s such a galling choice, not only because Amy has done nothing wrong but also because it implies that a man could come between Jo and her sister, so Jo has to do extra work emotionally to make that not be the case. Again I say, ew! EWW!!!!

There were some other moments of Jo/Laurie fan service that made me roll my eyes (Laurie kind-of-sort-of acting jealous when Bhaer shows up towards the end *insert eyeroll here*), but the ones I’ve outlined are, in my view, most egregious because it significantly muddies the two MOST FEMINIST themes the story — sisterhood and women’s self-knowledge. And obviously, an adaptation isn’t necessarily going to do everything according to the book, nor should it have to, but to mess up the themes you actually want to champion is…a choice.

In the end, there were a LOT of great things about Gerwig’s interpretation that really resonated with me on an individual script level — certain bits of quick-witted dialogue, + every! single! one!! of Jo’s and Amy’s monologues about being women in a world that wants to box them in and limit their choices. Meg’s entire character was perfection honestly (super pleasantly surprised by Emma Watson!), and I loved seeing her grapple with the wants of her younger self with the real, every day practicalities of marriage. Timothée Chalamet as Laurie surprisingly worked really well for me. The way Gerwig wove together themes of modern (white) womanhood with themes of (white) womanhood of the Civil War era. That absolutely spectacular ending, where Jo negotiates the value of her life’s work, and the discussion of how LMA was forced to give Jo a husband because otherwise the men in charge wouldn’t publish the book. There was SO much to love if I focus on the parts. Alas, when it comes to the whole…let’s just say, I think the 1994 version still reigns supreme!

Amazon.com: So Many Beginnings: A Little Women Remix (Remixed Classics, 2): 9781250853516: Morrow, Bethany C: Books

One thing that all of this Little Women discourse bouncing around in my head has done though is bump up Bethany C. Morrow’s Remixed retelling of Little Women, titled So Many Beginnings, VERY high up on my list!! A Little Women in which the March family is Black? YES. YES, PLEASE!!!! I am keyed up to read this soon because I cannot wait to see how Morrow takes a story that is exclusively centered on white womanhood and adapts it to her own experience.

How about you? Have you watched either or both adaptations of Little Women? What are your thoughts? Have you read Bethany Morrow’s retelling? Let me know in the comments, I’d love to hear your thoughts!

I finally watched the 2019 version of Little Women and we have to talk about it

+ a look back at my April/May reading, and some book recs for Pride Month!

Discussion about this post