“Little Women” Graphic Novel Makes It the Queer, Multiracial Story We Need Today

When I first read Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women as a child, I identified most with tomboy Jo, as did many a fledgling queer girl, I imagine. Now, a new graphic novel reimagines the four March sisters as a modern, multiracial family—and yes (spoiler alert), Jo is gay.

In Meg, Jo, Beth, and Amy, by Rey Terciero and Bre Indigo (Little, Brown Books for Young Readers), as in the original, the four sisters are living with their mother in Brooklyn, New York, and trying to make ends meet. Their father is absent, this time because he is serving with the Army in the Middle East. Meg, the oldest, was born to their Black father Robert and his first wife before she died. Like the original Meg, she loves clothes and parties and hopes to marry rich. Jo, next in line, is the child of their White mother Madison and her first husband, who left them. Like the original, she wants to be a writer. After Robert and Madison married they had Beth, a quiet musician finding her voice, and Amy, an ebullient artist.

The story was first serialized at Tapas Media last year, in honor of the 150th anniversary of Little Women, but is now available as a hardcover graphic novel or single e-book. Those familiar with Alcott’s work will recognize much in this new version: the family’s financial struggles; Beth’s illness (albeit leukemia, not scarlet fever); a kind neighbor and his grandson Laurie; Laurie’s handsome tutor with an interest in Meg; the March’s great-aunt, whom Jo assists. In the new version, however, the girls write to their father via e-mail; Laurie and his grandfather are Latino; Amy struggles with racist school bullies; Beth loves the music of Nina Simone; Meg parties with rich friends in the Hamptons—Jo favors boy’s clothes and is gradually becoming aware that she is a lesbian. There are also enough other twists that even readers of the original will be surprised by some of them. Terciero and Indigo have woven in the variations adeptly enough, though, that the story still feels true to itself, not just altered for the sake of change.

What hasn’t changed, however, is the sister’s fierce love of each other (despite sibling friction) and the story’s focus on girls’/women’s experience. As Anne Boyd Rioux, author of Meg, Jo, Beth, Amy: The Story of “Little Women” and Why It Still Matters, told the New York Times last year, “Just as Hemingway claimed that all of American literature (by men) came from ‘Huck Finn,’ we can also say that much of American women’s literature has come from ‘Little Women.’” To reimagine the work is to reassert that literature about women and girls still matters.

Although Terciero and Indigo, who both identify as queer, are the ones credited on the cover, the book was part of a much larger team effort, as the copyright page makes clear. Terciero wrote the story; Indigo did the pencil illustrations; inks were by Gabrielle Rose Camacho, Johana Avalos Merino, and Joanne Kwan; colors by Ryan Thompson, and lettering by A Larger World Studios. The illustrations are dynamic, colorful, and engaging, with a palette that conveys the warmth of the tale; longer text passages are presented as e-mails to family members or parts of the girls’ journals. The book feels like a deeply integrated whole, despite the many creators.

When the serialization of the story came out last year, Terciero said in a statement:

I loved Little Women growing up. Their struggles felt universal to me, especially feeling like I always had less than others. So it’s an absolute honor to be writing a re-telling of it. But Bre and I wanted to see ourselves in the characters too, which is why we made the family diverse and one of the characters LGBTQ. Jo is my favorite, so I wanted to play with the subtext that may not have been available 150 years ago, but that we can speak openly about these days. Being LGBT myself, I’m just happy to be creating a book that I wish I could have read as a young reader. But it’s also very PG, and very sweet. I wanted to be sensitive with the heavy topics while staying true to Alcott’s vision of empowering young women.

In that, they have succeeded wonderfully. Just as Alcott’s work was an exploration of what it means to be part of a family and female, so too is this one. Some of the trimmings may be different, but the love is the same. Buy this one for your kids—it feels appropriate and of interest for middle grades and up—or even for yourself. It’s officially on sale February 5, but available for preorder now.

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