Svetlana's Reads and Views

Name of Book: Little Women Author: Louisa May Alcott ISBN: 0-89375-707-1 Publisher: Troll Type of book: 1860s contemporary, coming of age, women, sisterhood, relationships, marriage, morals, friendship, growing up, war, death Year it was published: 1868-1869 Summary: Generations of readers young and old, male and female, have fallen in love with the March sisters of Louisa May Alcott’s most popular and enduring novel, Little Women. Here are talented tomboy and author-to-be Jo, tragically frail Beth, beautiful Meg, and romantic, spoiled Amy, united in their devotion to each other and their struggles to survive in New England during the Civil War. It is no secret that Alcott based Little Women on her own early life. While her father, the freethinking reformer and abolitionist Bronson Alcott, hobnobbed with such eminent male authors as Emerson, Thoreau, and Hawthorne, Louisa supported herself and her sisters with "woman’s work,” including sewing, doing laundry,...

Name of Book: The Moonstone Author: Wilkie Collins ISBN: 978-1-85326-044-5 Publisher: Woodsworth Classics Type of book: Mystery, detective, missing jewel, 1799, 1848-1850, England, Indians Year it was published: 1868 Summary: The Moonstone, a priceless Indian diamond which had been brought to England as spoils of war, is given to Rachel Verrinder on her eighteenth birthday. That very night, the stone is stolen. Suspicion then falls on a hunchbacked housemaid, on Rachel's cousin Franklin Blake, on a troupe of mysterious Indian jugglers, and on Rachel herself. The phlegmatic Sergeant Cuff is called in, and with the help of Betteredge, the Robinson Crusoe-reading loquacious steward, the mystery of the missing stone is ingeniously solved. Characters: This is written in first person, a type of an epistolary story novel. Franklin Blake wants the prominent members to write the stories of how they dealt with the Moonstone mystery. The only drawn out characters in t...