num_pages: 256
description: Beauty Skinner is, as she herself admits, a woman to whom small men have never been indifferent, that most unfortunate of females, a "big girl." Beauty is fated to be the subject of unbelieving stares, to stop conversations, and to realize with every lumbering step that towering ungainliness is the inescapable fact of her life.But in Ellen Akins's fierce comedy  Little Woman , escape is precisely what Beauty manages. After almost accidentally killing her twin sons (the product of a peculiar marriage into which she has stumbled), Beauty decides to head for greener pastures alone. Her cunning to set up a rural shelter where needy women can be rehabilitated, a shelter that is designed to fail quickly, leaving Beauty a cozy retreat of her own. Her willing the guileless philanthropist-heiress Clara Bow Cole, who is all too pleased to apply her wealth to this altruistic adventure. A plot of land and a house are secured, a group of down-and-out women is solicited, and Clara Bow and Beauty depart for the wilds of Wisconsin to await their charges.What arrives, however, are hardly the wretched souls that Beauty has anticipated. Molly, Kathy, Gigi, Lynn, Cathy, Elizabeth, Cora, Joan, Barbie, and Mary Belinda are, in fact, a ferocious and intractable crew. Thieves, drunkards, and runaways, they greet their new life with a raunchy stubbornness that leaves Beauty nonplussed as she becomes determined to make her bogus venture work. She insists that her diffident charges eke an existence out of the wilderness, a task that turns their colony into something like Robinson Crusoe's island in a bad year, and its occupants a distaff counterpart of  Lord of the Flies .While its heroines' battles to survive nature--and one another--have hilarious (and ultimately tragic) consequences,  Little Woman  takes an unsparing look at the struggle to form families and communities, and how people's need for control renders any sort of bond between them suspicious.
language: English
title: Little Woman: A Novel
titlecomplete: Little Woman: A Novel
ratings_count: 45
publisher: Perennial