An Old Fashioned Girl has always been one of my favorites of LM Alcott's works, and when I picked it up last night, I wondered if it would hold up well against adulthood and a literature degree and still resonate the same way it did when I was a pre-teen.

And it did. I can recognize a little bit of heavy-handedness in Alcott's dishing out of the moral, and there are certainly those who would scoff at the main character as ridiculously good, but I think the message Alcott tries to impart is just as necessary now as when it was written--live simply, love well, and do good, no matter how unfashionable it may be.

A great book for pre-teens, I think, and a wonderful mother-daughter read.