Customer Reviews

Louisa May Alcott Unmasked: Collected Thrillers

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This is an absolutely breathtaking collection of twenty-nine thrillers from Louisa May Alcott. Each story that I read kept me up until the wee hours of the morning because they were so good! And after I was done reading them, I was still thinking about them for days on end. Powerful women, betrayal, wards/guardians, romance, murder... each plays a delectable part in these brilliant novellettes. You have the masterfully manipulative Jean Muir in the famous story "Behind a Mask: Or a Woman's Power", the admirable villain in "A Nurse's Story", the wonderful Russian/Parisian love story of "Taming a Tartar", the heroic villainess in "The Mysterious Key, and What it Opened", an exquisite character study in "A Marble Woman: or, The Mysterious Model", dark tragedy and hints of incest in "A Whisper in the Dark", and the shockingly villainous hero in "La Jeune; or Actress and Woman" or "A Laugh and A Look". Then there is the delightfully frustrating "My Mysterious Mademoiselle", in which the protagonist is thwarted rather severely in his love interest. Love has a main role in almost all of these stories; usually emphasizing the power balance between the sexes. Alcott has a way of standing things on their heads, and is a master of the surprise ending.

Worth every minute, worth every dollar, this collection includes all of the known thrillers of Alcott, as well as a remarkably throrough and informative introduction by Madeleine Stern.

My 14 year old daughter really enjoyed these (relatively) short stories very much. Who would have guessed that the author of Little Women et all had this in her!