Absolutely delightful. Fun alternate take on the original with fun, quirky art. ( )

Note: I received a digital review copy of this book from the publisher through NetGalley. ( )

I don't want to be harsh, because I think this title will be very appealing for kids. Magic, graphic novel, a call-out to the March sisters, and the inclusivity of Laurie and his grandfather as a Black family -- those are all super appealing.

To me, as an adult, it just didn't work.
1: Changing all the various talents that the girls have in the original to magic talents could have been very cool, had they been better explained. As it is, I mostly just felt like this book was trying to superimpose motivations on the characters to fit the plot, because that was the plot in the original story, and not because it made any sense for this group of characters where they are.

2: I do not think that trying to encompass magic as a motivation for the Civil War works very well at all in this instance, because in this instance it felt like it diminished the role slavery and racism had in the real war and tokenized the Black characters.

3: There's a ton of unintentional shorthand in here -- for example, Aunt Josephine's crankiness about the Marchs and their "Transcendentalist ways" is very sketchily explained. The clothing everyone is wearing is generic and not at all appropriate to the time period -- not that anything stood out as egregiously modern, but nothing genuinely looked authentic, either. There's just a lot of stuff like that, where the details are left behind because it is assumed that the reader read the original and will appreciate how bringing magic to the story makes it magical. That's not how it works, really. That's lazy storytelling.

Dang, I didn't mean to be so grumpy about it, but I really wasn't impressed, and I wanted to be.

Advanced Readers Copy provided by Oni Press ( )

Little Women is one of my favorite classic novels, so when I saw this was a mashup of Little Women plus WITCHES, I was super excited. The resulting comic is a little light on plot, with lots of promise but not enough development to be satisfying.
In this retelling, Laurie is a Black teen living with his Black, formerly enslaved grandfather. The way the comic is colored, it's nearly impossible to differentiate the grandfather's skin from his features. I could have excused it since the illustrations overall aren't highly defined and carry a whimsical feel common to children's graphic novels... but the white characters are lit properly. This felt like a clumsy attempt to tie slavery to the narrative without taking the time to metaphorically and physically draw the Black grandfather as a full person.
Magic is used in the South by slaveowners to keep enslaved people restricted to their property and for punishment. This does come into play late in the book, but it didn't work as a way to mash together the Little Women callbacks and the magic worldbuilding in the story.

Overall, I wanted too much and the book ended up as something I won't be recommending for purchase at my library. ( )

A bland reimagining of the March sisters as witches. The world-building is rather vague with the time and setting being the same as the original Little Women novel, but there are lots of witches, but some are hunted and others are considered okay if they are registered and behaved. The witch stuff actually doesn't seem that important, as it's all rather dull family life minutiae reflecting the source material until a villain and a big confrontation are tossed in for some excitement at the end.

The art is okay, but I did have frequent trouble telling apart Beth, Jo, Meg, and Marmee. Come to think on it, their personalities were a bit hard to distinguish also.

Anyhow, it's all blandity, bland, bland, bland. ( )