Talking about Marmee & Louisa and My Heart Is Boundless today with Shelley Irwin on WGVU-FM's Morning Show in Grand Rapids, and with Paul Perrello on Metro Networks in Philadelphia. Next week I'll be on KCMN-AM's “Tron in  the Morning” in Colorado Springs. What a pleasure it is to chat about these books. And what a privilege it was to write them.

The Washington Independent Review has picked Marmee & Louisa: The Untold Story of Louisa May Alcott and Her Mother as its book of the week. The review, by Susan Ware, general editor of American National Biography, begins, "Generations of readers have cherished gentle Marmee, the steadfast mother in Little Women who holds together her family of four girls while the father is off at war. According to Eve LaPlante, the real woman is much more interesting. Abigail May, an intellectually ambitious young woman, was thwarted by 19th-century gender expectations. Locked in a challenging marriage to a man who disdained the idea of making money, Abigail often had to fend for her family by herself. LaPlante emphasizes Abigail’s previously underappreciated role as Louisa’s muse, mentor and emotional lodestar, and reveals Abigail as an interesting character in her own right."

Bn.com has sold out of MARMEE & LOUISA, which is in its third printing! Both it and MY HEART IS BOUNDLESS were named best books of the year, the former by NPR and Salon and the latter by The Seattle Times.

In SALON last week, Maureen Corrigan, NPR's book reviewer, named her top 10 books of 2012, among them MARMEE & LOUISA! Corrigan wrote,

"What was the single most memorable character from a 2012  book? Honestly, Louisa May Alcott’s mother, Abigail, who is one of the subjects of Eve LaPlante’s dual biography called Marmee & Louisa, is someone I knew nothing about and whose activist life and tart, intelligent writing just blew me away."

To read more about Corrigan's Top Ten Books  in SALON:

http://www.salon.com/2012/12/23/what_to_read_awards_maureen_corrigan/