Young adult literature has no shortage of riffs on Louisa May Alcott's classic bildungsroman, Little Women. The best of these, such as So Many Beginnings by Bethany C. Morrow, converse fluently with Alcott's novel while adding new perspectives in a way that seems essential, almost predestined. Katie Bernet's audacious debut, Beth Is Dead, is an astonishingly successful addition to their ranks.
The 21st-century-set novel opens as Jo and Amy March find the body of their sister Beth near the house of Jo's friend and Amy's clandestine hook-up, Laurie. Bernet nimbly moves among the points of view of all four March sisters to unspool the ensuing investigation and to reveal events in the distant and immediate past that lead up to the murder.
In a novel filled with numerous smart and imaginative authorial choices, the smartest is also the most significant break from Alcott's canon--well, after murder. In Bernet's rendition, Mr. March isn't an army chaplain but an author. His breakout novel is Little Women, a thinly veiled depiction of the lives of his daughters (Beth dies in this one, too), which he publishes to immediate controversy and commercial success.
This move allows Bernet to put her March sisters in relationship with readers' preconceived notions of Alcott's March sisters and to push against simplistic, unfairly limited understandings of their characters: villainous Amy, sweet Beth, pretty Meg, clever Jo. The sisters must reckon with what their father's book got right and wrong about them and the consequences of the tension between reality and fiction. What's more, Bernet isn't afraid to implicate readers in this tension. "I thought Dad made me a stereotype, but the fans did that," Meg reflects.
Lest this all sound too cerebral to be fun, don't forget that Beth Is Dead is a murder mystery--and a whopping good one. Who among the denizens of Alcott's Concord, Mass., could be capable of such a heinous crime? As the case turns up suspect after suspect, readers will see familiar characters such as Sallie Gardiner (Meg's best friend), Henry Hummel (Heinrich in Alcott's novel, a member of the immigrant family helped by the Marches), and Fred Vaughn (Amy's would-be suitor) in new and significantly more homicidal lights.
Toward the end of Beth Is Dead, Jo recounts asking her father why his fictional Beth had to die. "He said that... her loss would stay with his readers forever." Bernet's novel will, too. --Stephanie Appell, freelance reviewer
Shelf Talker: Katie Bernet's audacious and astonishingly successful debut novel reimagines Little Women as a metafictional murder mystery.