By Ann Napolitano

Oh, hi.

Hello Beautiful is classified as a modern “Little Women” and is a rollercoaster of emotions. If you know the story of Little Women, it is similar because it is a story of four sisters and their differences as they grow into women. As a sister to five siblings, I can relate to the trials of finding your place in the world among successful siblings, cute siblings, younger siblings, and all the other things kids get mixed into.

I don’t quite know if there’s a main character in this book. The book follows the four sisters lives as children and into college and then adulthood, but there are two sisters who tend to take the spotlight. Much like Jo and Amy, these two sisters, well apart in age, find love in the same man and have to navigate their relationship through it.

There is Julia, Sylvie, Emeline, and Cecelia. Emeline and Cecelia are twins and Julia and Sylvia are very best friends. In the ’70’s, a college age Julia attends a college basketball game with her three younger sisters to watch a boy named William. From that point, it spins quickly into a strong-willed woman who seems to pressure a quiet, abused and neglected boy into the dream of marriage. He agrees and seems happy enough, but his childhood is still looming, his knee injury has destroyed his dream of a basketball career and that is creating incredible difficulty for him to become the man he needs to be for Julia.

“We’re getting married and having a baby!”

Julia becomes pregnant, at what seems is her insistence, and while William is clearly not mentally ready to be able to handle marriage, let alone a child, Julia insists. Julia’s sister, Sylvie seems to connect with William while he’s in an obvious depression. William starts missing work and is starting to spiral. When William naturally fails at being a husband and father, he tells Julia that they must separate. She takes her daughter and leaves and learns very quickly that her husband tried to kill himself. Instead of going to see him or trying to understand his mental well-being, she leaves with her daughter without checking on him or trying to contact him and eventually, William signs away his parental rights.

Julia goes on to try to be a strong and successful single mother, and Sylvie is concerned about her (ex) brother-in-law, so she visits him in secret to make sure he has someone to take care of him.

The twins become absolutely amazing women with such different personalities and trials to overcome. One of the sisters realizes she is gay and another cannot have children even though it’s her very dream.

Sylvia and William end up having a connection because she was the only person in his life who ever actually cared about him, and when that connection comes to light, the sister’s lives are upturned and they have to decide if blood is really thicker than water.

*Warning: Unpopular Opinion* If this book’s message was supposed to be a beautiful story of strong women, sisterhood, and family, the message did not get through to me. It was overshadowed by a scorned woman who took her daughter away from her ex-husband, who was severely depressed, and never looked back, while acting very much the martyr and basically removing her daughter from all the family she’s ever known.

YES, the husband is also to blame for his choices, but I mean…She took off INSTANTLY and it really negatively affected her daughter. She didn’t even try to see where he was coming from, why he might be unhappy, or why he tried to commit suicide. She literally did not care. And when, in his darkest hour, he offered to sign away his parental rights, she happily accepted instead of trying to talk to him at all and push for a relationship between her daughter and her daughter’s father.

This book was a 4/10 for me. It was an interesting story, the writing was good, I was emotionally invested. The book was also supposed to take place in a time where people were starting to notice and care about mental health issues and instead, this book focuses on a scorned woman and her fight with her sister.

I won’t do pros and cons, because I feel like I’ve already laid all those out for you. Many people love this book, so you should still read it because you might just adore it. As a child of divorce and a woman who’s dealt with the drama of a mother not wanting their children to have good relationship with their father and often even trying to sabotage it, this book was not for me.