Linny tells Nancy about her deployment experience in Maui, a behavioral health volunteer to assist the residents of Lahaina. She was there for over a week as a credentialed expert with the American Red Cross. Linny has worked locally with the American Red Cross and this is her first deployment, which was her plan once she retired from full-time counseling work. The wildfires occurred about a year ago and the recovery is still underway. Our book this month is Hello Beautiful by Ann Napolitano. It’s sort of a modern-day retelling of Little Women by Louisa May Alcott. Hello Beautiful is a new book, published just a year ago. It is mostly set-in present-day Chicago. There are four sisters, like Little Women, but so much about Hello Beautiful departs pretty dramatically from its inspiration. In fact, the author, Ann Napolitano says riffing off LIttle Women only occurred to her about 100 pages into writing the book. Nancy read Little Women and, in fact, the entire series. Linny laughed at Nancy asking whether she had read Little Women. No was her answer. But. She has seen a movie based on Little Women, so she was familiar with the characters. Hello Beautiful was the 100th Oprah’s Book Club pick and New York Times Bestseller, and a Chicago Public Library Ten Best Books of the Year Selection. Lots of praise! Nancy felt this book felt like the story of how parents influence their children’s lives for better and often for worse! All the characters in this book, William Waters, the lonely Laurie-like character, and the four Padavano sisters each struggle with how to fulfill their parents’ expectations and how that does or doesn’t fit with who they really are. The girls’ mom, unlike Marmie in Little Women, is pretty cold to her daughters. Rose is really disappointed in her husband’s lack of ambition and determines that her girls will not get pregnant out of wedlock and will be successful. She loves her girls so much that she is unable to allow them to live their lives when their lives depart from her vision of what she wants for them. It’s more their father, Charlie, that provides love to them, but he is sort of pitied by them all because he seems like such a hapless character. But, at his crowded funeral, they find out all the amazing acts of kindness and charity that he committed throughout his entire life. The four sisters are reflections of their parent’s dreams and disappointments, in a lot of ways: • Julia, the oldest, decides she is going to marry a man she can make successful and she is very much a fixer and control freak. Her marriage to William fails because her husband is unable to live up to her expectations. She leaves Chicago with her baby to build a new life. Upsetting Rose, but fulfilling her father’s vision for her which is that she is a rocket. • Sylvie has a dream of finding a once in a generation love affair. When she falls in love with William, this separates her from her closest sister, Julia, and Julia’s baby. Rose is horrified by this. • Cecilia is an artist who wants to express herself and make the world beautiful. She becomes pregnant at 17 and has Izzy. She never reveals who the father is. Rose basically disowns Cecilia and moves to Florida. • Emeline is the caregiver who wants to take care of others. She realizes she’s gay. This also upsets Rose. The sisters are very close to one another, but the choices they make separate them from each other at different points throughout the story and disappoint their mother. The author beautifully illustrates how our expectations for those we love can separate us from them and can smother them, really. Linny felt most connected to Emeline. This was no surprise to Nancy because she felt Emelin was most like Linny in that she is a kind caregiver who wants to help people. Nancy connected most to Sylvie and felt there was a lot of Sylvie like her in that she loved to read. Nancy thought the four sisters, the Padavano sisters in this book, would be the main characters, but at the end, she felt that William Waters, the husband of two of the sisters really seemed like the main character. He is a very lonely boy, sort of like Laurie in Little Women, who comes into the family. He has no relationship with his parents because of an early tragedy in their lives that seals them away from him emotionally. That tragedy is that his three-year old sister dies the same week he is born. His parents are unable to even look at him without remembering their lost daughter and to say they are emotionally distant is an understatement. This casts a sadness throughout his entire life which seems to be the engine of the story. William carries the feeling throughout his life that he will ruin other people’s lives and that he doesn’t deserve love. Ann Napolitano really beautifully portrays this throughout the book and his actions flow quite realistically from those deep wounds. He tries to take his own life, he divorces Julia and gives up parental rights to their baby, Alice. The book concludes with his realization that he has inadvertently recreated the same kind of separation with his child that his parents did with him and he resolves to mend that wound. Linda liked how his basketball teammates in high school and at Northwestern University become the friend structure for his life. HIs best friend, Kent becomes a doctor and who also helps manage William’s depression, along with being an encourager and helper at so many points in his life. Kent also rallies the other teammates to help William at points throughout the story and makes sure William stays connected with them. In Little Women one of the sisters, Beth, famously dies. Big spoiler alert: In Hello Beautiful, both Linny and Nancy expected Emeline to die because she was most Beth-like. In fact, in one scene of the book, the sisters are each figuring out which Little Woman character they are. Turns out, it’s not Emeline that dies, but Sylvie. Nancy liked that the book covers a big part of the characters’ lifetimes. So, you get to experience “firsthand” things in their lives and then you get to experience them remembering and making sense of those things. It brings so much depth to the characters.