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Journal Entry 1 by  k00kaburra from San Jose, California USA on Saturday, May 08, 2010
 Rec'd via the LibraryThing Early Reviewers program.
PAPERBACK ARC.
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Product Description
A literary landmark—the original, suppressed draft of the classic novel!
Little Women is a timeless classic. But Louisa May Alcott’s first draft—before her editor sunk his teeth into it—was even better. Now the original text has at last been exhumed. In this uncensored version, the March girls learn some biting lessons, transforming from wild girls into little women—just as their friends and neighbors transform into vicious, bloodthirsty werewolves!
Here are tomboy Jo, quiet Beth, ladylike Amy, and good-hearted Meg, plus lovable neighbor Laurie Laurence, now doomed to prowl the night on all fours, maiming and devouring the locals. As the Civil War rages, the girls learn the value of being kind, the merits of patience and grace, and the benefits of knowing a werewolf who can disembowel your teacher.
By turns heartwarming and blood-curdling, this rejuvenated classic will be cherished and treasured by those who love a lesson in virtue almost as much as they enjoy a good old-fashioned dismemberment.
Includes the original letter from Alcott’s editor, telling her not to even think about it!
About the Author
Porter Grand holds an A.S. in liberal arts and a Bachelor's and Doctoral in Theology. She has worked, among other jobs, as a waitress, bartender, carnival barker, go-go dancer, shampoo girl, welfare caseworker, and reference librarian. She writes daily in the Huntsburg, Ohio, farmhouse where she lives with her husband, two extraordinary dogs, and two cats—but no werewolves.
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Journal Entry 3 by k00kaburra from San Jose, California USA on Tuesday, May 18, 2010
Finished today.
The famous story of Little Women as Ms. Alcott originally intended it – with werewolves! Removed from the text of the original novel at the suggestion of a concerned editor, this long-suppressed manuscript has finally been published in full. During the Civil War, the four March sisters – Meg, Jo, Beth and Amy – must learn how to grow into proper young women by day and worry over werewolves stalking their town at night. When Jo and Beth discover that their handsome neighbor Laurie and his grandfather are both werewolves, they resolve to keep it a secret from the others. After all, they’re only monsters on the night of the full moon…
So yeah. In the spirit of Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, Little Women and Werewolves takes the text of an old classic and fuses with a new writer’s monstrous insertions. It’s been a good six or eight years since I last read Alcott’s novel, but I remember it pretty well since I once played Jo in a school play.
First, the werewolves. Since the transformation for man to werewolf only happens in the evening, on the night of the full moon, the ‘monsters’ are regular people most of the time. So it was pretty easy for Porter Grand to keep the main characters essentially the same in personality and lifestyle. There’s more of a threat to the girls from the Brigade, a group of men and women who search for werewolves with a witch hunter’s fanaticism, executing those suspected of being werewolves or merely being a werewolf sympathizer.
I knew that new scenes would have to be added to fully utilize the gore potential. Some of them were quite fun, such as when werewolf-Laurie hunts down one of Amy’s cruel teachers and eats him. But others were quite strange. After Mr. March returns from the war, he organizes an exhibition of the men who lost limbs during the war. I mean, he basically makes a freak show of amputees. It’s a fundraiser for war veterans. That’s so weird. After several of the amputees are eaten by werewolves, he devotes himself to creating a giant alter in the local church built from the skeletons of werewolf victims. It’s not humorous or horrible…just utterly bizarre.
Some of the characters’ personalities and relationships were changed in a way that wasn’t true to the original novel at all. Jo wants her youngest sister Amy to die after they have a fight; Beth develops a romantic relationship with Grandfather Laurence instead of mere friendship. I felt that the juxtaposition of Little Women’s morality tales and the semi-gothic horror wolf hunts never really meshed into a whole story. Ultimately, I thought this monster mash-up failed.
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Journal Entry 5 by bookeryfergus at Fergus, Ontario Canada on Tuesday, February 14, 2012
I picked this book up in Kitchener, Ontario is it now in my used book shoppe in Fergus, Ontario. The Bookery, 191 St. Andrew Str. West. www.bookery.ca
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Little Women and Werewolves
