Summary
Amy grew up with a mother who loved the book Little Women. In turn, she insisted on being called Marmee and named her two daughters Jo and Amy. They even had a next-door neighbor named Theo who her mom compared to Laurie.

Beyond the forced comparisons, Amy’s love life is nothing like her literary counterpart. Her relationship with Theo has been unrequited, and then they become accidental roommates. There is definite tension between them, but is it that they have feelings for each other, or awkwardness from their fallout years before?

Review
I wanted to love this. I adore Little Women, the movies and the book. It's not a retelling but a homage to the book, and it's a dual POV between Amy and Theo, which is one of my favorite ways to read a romance... I love seeing the different perspectives and thought processes between the leads.
I had a few problems with this story though... First, I didn't feel any chemistry between Theo and Amy. Their backstory about how Theo used to confide in Amy was the only part that truly showed any connection between the two. Jo was incredibly unlikeable and self-centered. I know she was a bit in Little Women, but her lying and hiding things to Amy, her 'best friend' as well as sister, was difficult for me. There was a lot going on, but at the same time.. not? They fight between Amy and Theo, and fight between Theo and Jo, the work drama for Amy, Amy trying to date, her best friend wanting to try to have kids, the cats and dogs at the house, Amy and Jo's mom... there were just so many parts to the story, but none of them were fleshed out enough for me to really care.

I had high hopes for this book. I have never read the Little Women book but I have loved the movies based on the book. This book unfortunately fell flat to me. Just words on the page that didn’t make much of a plot. I stopped reading at 22% because I kept getting distracted and was uninterested in finishing it. I didn’t feel any chemistry with Amy and Theo and Jo was really an annoying.

Thank you to NetGalley and Forever Publishing company.

Leave it to the March Sisters by Annie Sereno is a contemporary romance loosely based on Amy and Laurie from Little Women. We alternate between the point-of-view of both main characters.

Amy Marsden's career in education is on an upward trajectory, currently a professor and chair of the department. She also goes through boyfriends like a box of tissues. After a recent break-up, she signs a one-year lease to rent a floor of a house while the landlord is out of town. And oops, the owner of the house is the boy next door she's been in love with most of her life.

This doesn't seem to be a named series, but we see some of the characters from Sereno's debut novel, Blame it on the Brontës in this installment. You can definitely read it as a stand-alone, but if you want more context about how Athena and Thorne get together, you'll want to read that one first.

In general, I really enjoyed the characters in this book, especially the side characters. I loved Amy and her pragmatism.

What fell a bit flat to me was the plot. The pacing of this book felt kind of weird to me. Some things come to a head and resolve way quickly than they should; the ending is very rushed. This may be a bit because the characters acted at least ten years younger than they were supposed to be. Amy is 34 and Theo is slightly older to her. I also wasn't entirely sold on their chemistry--their one main sex scene felt pretty awkward to me.

Tropes in this book include: slow burn, forced proximity, friends to enemies to friends to lovers

CW: abusive relationships, toxic relationships, children of divorce

dnf 26%. I tried. I really really really wanted to give this book a chance, but I'm a quarter of the way in and I can't make myself care about Amy or Theo. I also have no idea what the actual story is because so far there has been no plot, just exposition. I was turned off instantly by Theo because he is a landlord, why they couldn't just let him be only a therapist is beyond me. Also the fact that his practice is threatening to fire him because two of his couples are getting divorced is just insane and no where near reality. Amy comes across as so young and immature (which yes, that's her character in Little Women) but it makes it impossible for me to believe she is not only a college professor but a department head. I also find it very weird that Little Women exists in the book and Amy is constantly comparing her life to the book. I really don't know what the author was trying to do. There was nothing offensive or overtly bad, it just doesn't work.

The “girls who love Little Women” to “women who read romance” pipeline is very strong. I have no data to back this up, but it FEELS true.

I absolutely loved this book: justice for the TheoandAmy love story (1994 did them dirty), complicated sister dynamics, second chance, ROOMIES, animal rescue….Leave It to the March Sisters comes out May 30! Thank you @readforeverpub for the copy.

⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️/5
🌶/5
🐈‍⬛📖🎨✈️🥧/5

CW: domestic violence, divorce, car accident, working in academia, Las Vegas wedding chapel

What I liked about this book was the connection it had to Little Women and literature generally. It's not a retelling, but it is a loving homage to the classic and those who love it. However, this book was so long, and nothing happened for huge stretches (wait, kind of like Little Women, if I think about it), and that was frustrating at times.

Overall, this was cute! I love that it was an ode to Little Women but Amy was in the spotlight. It was a little too slow moving for me. I appreciate a good slow burn, but this wasn’t it. Having the MCs date other people is always hit or miss for me and I wasn’t feeling it in this particular book. It just felt like things were rushed once the romance hit. And the secrets? I felt like they demolished the trust between Amy and Theo and were too easily forgiven. The secondary characters were fun and there’s a lot of good banter, but I think the story as a whole just could have been executed better.

Thank you to Forever for an advanced copy. My thoughts are my own.

After another failed relationship, Amy Marsden needs to quickly find a new place to live. She ends up renting a room from Theo Sinclair, her former neighbor. Although she’s had a crush on him since they were kids, Theo is strictly off-limits having once dated her sister Jo.

Leave It to the March Sisters is loosely based on Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women. This is not a scene-for-scene contemporary rewrite. It does share some general themes along with the character names. Readers do not need to have read Little Woman to understand Leave It to the March Sisters. It stands solidly on its own.

A few characters from the author’s book Blame It on the Brontes do appear throughout this book but it can be read as a stand-alone. (I do highly recommend Blame It on the Brontes as well!) I’m glad to see a bit more of Athena and Thorne’s story.

This book is a slow burn but it is an absolute necessity to the plot. Both Amy and Theo have complicated pasts that they need time to work out throughout the storyline. I appreciate that the author doesn’t just throw them together from the beginning. The gradual rekindling of their friendship that eventually leads to more is much more realistic. It’s also more true to the source material.

Having read the author’s previous novel did give me some insight as to what to expect for this book. This is not a spicy retelling! This is a sweet, fun romance for any contemporary romance lover whether they enjoy “the classics” or not.

I voluntarily read and reviewed an advanced copy of this book. I received a finished paperback copy of the book as part of a giveaway from the author. All thoughts and opinions are my own. Thank you to Annie Sereno, NetGalley, and Forever (Grand Central Publishing)!

I really enjoyed this second novel by Annie Sereno. It follows Amy as a thirty something college professor trying to come to terms with her past with Theo (Teddy) and getting her inspiration for painting back. She has decided to be done dating lame guys and wait for something more deep and meaningful. After getting dumped and left to find a new place to live Amy signs a lease to stay at one of Theo’s properties unbeknownst to her. It comes as a surprise to Theo as well. He’s used to traveling and being alone with his house of rescue animals while trying to get his counseling career established. Can Theo and Amy move on from the mistakes in their pasts and learn to love each other in a new way?

I enjoyed all the Little Women references and the homage paid to the classic novel. But I really appreciated the new and fun twist on the story, it made it fresh and interesting!

I also appreciated how toxic relationships were explored both through Theo’s clients and Theo and Amy themselves. A great way to make readers really think deep about what healthy relationships look like. Well done!

I was excited by the premise of this and was grateful to have the opportunity to read it through NetGalley. However, I could not get into this book. It was a DNF at 27% for me. The story pacing was too slow for me, and I could not connect with Amy. She seemed rather flat, and I found the conflict between why the love interests hadn't spoken to be unrealistic.

The heroine is over her disastrous love life that is full of terrible choices. She ends up becoming roommates with her crush, the commitment-phobic hero who is also her sister's best friend. Yet the close proximity with each other changed the dynamics of their relationship, which may help with the hero view the heroine in a new light. Will this change in the relationship result in the happy ending that the heroine longs for, or will it be another addition to her catastrophic love life?

This is a modern tale of the classic LITTLE WOMEN book focusing on the heroine that married her sister's friend. The author captured the heroine in a way that has some essence of that heroine role that she was aiming for. Yet it was not enough for me to change my view of said heroine role and this book's heroine, a character that was just a presence in the classic book. I'm glad that this book's heroine is together with the hero, who I didn't gravitate to in the story. Thus, I wasn't as committed to their romance as the book wanted readers to be, but the story did have a nice flow to it. Overall, a nice book for those who adore the couple from the classic book and want that aforementioned couple to have their own modern book.


** Thanks to the publisher and NetGalley for the review copy. All opinions and thoughts in the review are my own. **

Read if you like:
💘 Romance
🍋 Little Women
🎨 Art and Painting
😆 Banter
💜 Rom-Coms

I never was on board for Amy and Laurie in the book/movie Little Women but I think this book may have just changed my mind as I really enjoyed this retelling and seeing Amy and Theo’s love story bloom.

I loved the forced proximity and how they came together and unpacked their trauma together and through that grew as a couple.

If you are a fan of Retellings or like me neber were on board for Amy and Laurie I hope this one helps steer you towards their love story like it did for me!

Thank you to Forever Books for my ARC in exchange for my review!

Little Women is my favorite classic and I’m always excited to read a modern day retelling!

The title of the book led me to believe this would be another modern day retelling, but it wasn’t. The characters have the names (sisters Amy and Jo, best friend Theo) and similar hobbies but it’s not a retelling as much as an “inspired by”.

*Amy was raised by a mother who loved Little Women, so much so that she named her two daughters after the characters. Incidentally, their next door neighbor was a rich boy named Theo! Amy is an English professor and aspiring artist who has harbored a crush on Theo since her teen years. Now in their 30s, they unknowingly become roommates after a falling out left them estranged years before.*

I was really excited for this book; the story started out strong and I really enjoyed Amy’s character! Unfortunately, by the end, I had to force myself to finish reading and it just fell flat for me.

First, this was supposed to be a second-chance, forced proximity romance. However, there was absolutely no chemistry between Amy and Theo. Even in the middle of a sex scene, I still felt absolutely nothing between them. They were supposed to have been secretly in love with each other since they were teenagers but the sexual tension just wasn’t there.

This story contained so many conflicts. One after the other, with some that were pretty heavy. But each one was resolved quickly, with little dialogue between characters. Pretty much an “oops, sorry”, maybe a few shed tears, and then everyone would hug and make up. Many things were unrealistic about this book, but this one really got to me the most.

This may just be personal preference, but I hated how much time would pass between chapters. Things jumped around so much, and sometimes the gals were so large you were left feeling like you actually missed something. There were a few times where I thought I had zoned out and not absorbed what I read, and this left much of story feeling very detached.

Thank you NetGalley and Forever (Grand Central Publishing) for the arc!

As with all of the other reviewers I wanted to read this because of my love of Little Women so I requested it from NetGalley. I was very excited when I realized this book is about a modern day Amy and Laurie getting together. I am here for it. However the pacing was way off. Either they get together at the beginning, have a falling out, and then get back together at the end, or you spend the whole book with them finally getting together at the end, but in this one they get together at 83% which was weird. So I was with it for the first third of the book getting to know Theo and Amy, but then it just slows down with not much going on. It just seems like Amy and Theo complaining about their jobs. And then when they finally get together there is too much book left. Secrets should have come out earlier. The ending was very rushed. I did enjoy Jo being in the book. The Marmee character was very strange. I'm not sure what the author was doing with her. She is a black widow with multiple husbands dying and everyone just seems to laugh about it. That was kind of cringey. Overall it was fine.

-Rose muttered curses involving provolone, and Theo braced himself. Once they entered the volatile world of cheese, there was no telling what might happen.

-"Hey, you look pale. Are you okay?"
"Morning sickness. I do believe I may be giving birth to a career."

I really like Theo and Amy. I found them to be interesting, captivating, relatable characters. I enjoyed the dynamic between them and their friends. The theme of the book is romantic relationships in all it’s varieties, which was depicted interestingly. They are both scarred characters but in different ways. I loved how they grew as individuals throughout the course of the story. The various secondary characters added to the fabric of the story. I did at times get lost in the various secondary characters and the story lines they were involved in as there were a lot of them. Overall I enjoyed the story.

I voluntarily read and reviewed an advanced copy of this book. All thoughts and opinions are my own.

Ooph I struggled with this one. As I mentioned in my review of The Late Mrs. Willoughby, it is really hard to tamper with beloved literary characters. Even harder I think when you try to place them in the present. It doesn’t always translate well, what kept people apart and/or down in the original might not be an issue in 2023 and trying to shoehorn it in doesn’t work.

I like that Sereno is giving the reader a much broader, more sympathetic view of Amy, much like Greta Gerwig did in her 2019 film Little Women. Amy is more like the rest of us than Jo, though I think we would all like to be more Jo than Amy, at least as portrayed by Alcott. And I think Sereno could have done that if she hadn’t tried so hard to create drama where there was none. She could have used the idea that this book’s Marmee really loved the original book and break out from there. But it just never seemed to work.

I liked this Amy and I would have really loved to have focused just on her and Theo. I love a set of secondary characters but there were just too many in this book and it was hard to keep up. It also distracted from the story of Theo and Amy. And the development of Theo as a character; I was never sure why Amy would fall for this guy, sweet as he was. I was kind of routing for her and Gary to get together and throw the whole thing on its head. The subplots with Jo and Marmee, then Athena and Thorne, and Lando and Stella, it just overwhelmed the story.

I received this as a NetGalley Arc and I am not sure if any changes were made along the way since I got this back in March. I hope they made some tweaks because there was a lot there to work with. I think if I were to recommend this book,I would do so with the caveat that this is less a full romance than it is more a novel of growth.

*I received a free ARC of this book from NetGalley in exchange for an honest review*

This was a fun re-imagining of Little Women, that acknowledges the source material in a neat way. As a huge Little Women fan, I really enjoyed it but unfortunately found that the writing was lacking at times. There were a lot of abrupt scene changes, parts felt very rushed, and some of the instigating drama felt extremely manufactured. The book lacked organic growth and progression, which as a reader often jolted me directly out of the plot as I figured out what was going on after an abrupt change.

Despite those criticisms, I still found this mostly enjoyable and I would recommend it to fans of Little Women and retellings.

I love a little women inspired book and while I did enjoy this, I was hoping for more.

I didn’t love the pacing of this book, sometimes it felt like things were drawn out between Amy and Theo and also Amy and her sister and them other times when their conflicts were easily solved and didn’t feel sincere to me.

That being said, Theo and Amy together was a good relationship and I liked the build around them.

A fun read. Jo and Met are sisters, and Theo the childhood friend that they have both fallen out with. When Amy inadvertently moves in to his house, will it start the path to forgiveness? I felt he was forgiven a bit quickly at the end.

This isn't quite a retelling of Little Women. Close but different enough. Definitely women's fiction. Which can be hit or miss for me. It can be slow at times and almost too long. Where nothing is really happening but enough to keep my attention to finish the book. I enjoyed the book despite the slowness. It was fun to see Athena & Thorne from the previous book, Blame it on the Bronte's.