I love, love beyond loved this book. As of the time of this recording, this book is the best book that I’ve read so far this year. In fact, it’s one of the best that I’ve read in a very long time. I’ve read a lot of books in my life, but when someone asks me what my favorite book is I always fall back on The Time Traveler’s Wife or Never Let Me Go. I have now added a third.

This book has been described as a modern retelling of Little Women. While I wouldn’t go so far as to say it’s a retelling, I could go with a modern reimagining where the four Padavano sisters – Julia, Sylvie, and twins Cecelia and Emeline fill in for the four March sisters – Meg, Jo, Beth and Amy, and beautifully broken basketball player William acts as a sort of Laurie, with the book alternating between the third-person points of view of William, Julia and Sylvie.

What I liked is the characters in Hello Beautiful weren’t an exact 1:1 match of the Little Women characters as far as personality goes. Julia is definitely head strong like Jo and Amy, where as Sylvie is the bookish one but also a romantic (a mix of Jo and Meg), but also a little bit of Beth because she always wants everyone to be okay. Cecelia also has a bit of Jo in that she is very creative, while Emeline is quiet, kind and also very much a caretaker much like Beth and Meg.

In the first chapter we meet William and we learn that his sister died six days after he was born. Her death ruined his parents and they spent very little time with William. They are very distant toward him and William spends a lot of time playing basketball. A group of boys let him play on the playground with them and eventually a gym teacher who sees promise in him encourages him to play in school. Thanks to a growth spurt and increased talent, William manages to secure a scholarship to Northwestern University in Chicago – far from his parents. The distance between him and his parents is perfectly summed up in the sentence, “they’d only ever had one child, and it wasn’t him.”

It’s at Northwestern that he meets Julia Padavano. Julia is smart, no-nonsense and headstrong and she decides immediately that William is going to be her boyfriend. Soon he meets her sisters and eventually her parents (her hardworking mother, Rose, who is a traditional Catholic, no-nonsense and freely speaks her mind – and her loveable, bumbling, Walt Whitman loving father, Charlie who would give anyone the shirt off his back whether he could afford to or not.)

William is part of Julia’s 10-year-plan: Get married, get out of Chicago and start a family. He is happy to go along with this plan and does whatever Julia tells him to do. He’s never had this before. He finally feels wanted and that he is a part of something. On their wedding day, Rose tells him he is to call her “mom” now, and at one point he says, “Thank you for everything, Mom.” Mom hurt his throat on the way out; he’d rarely used the term – his own mother had seemed to prefer he call her nothing at all, so he’d done that. The word had long been dormant, covered with rust, inside him.

As time goes on, William and Julia have a child, and Julia grows tired of William relying on her to make all of his decisions. The relationship begins to erode and it ends up having a ripple effect – and touches everyone in the Padavano family.

While the bond between the sisters is very much the heart of the novel, it’s William’s story that is the catalyst for everything that happens going forward. This beautiful, lost and oh-so-broken sweet man seems to set forth an unstoppable ripple in this family simply by making the choice to leave Chicago to play basketball at Northwestern where he meets Julia.

And the thing is, often times when you have a boy that enters the picture and disturbs the foundation that holds sisters close – such as the Padavano girls, the character is typically written as a bad boy, or he has a mean streak. William was neither of these things. He is seriously one of the sweetest, gentlest guys yet he manages to upset the balance in this family by simply existing, and wanting to be wanted.

The book is amazingly written, and covers topics of neglect, betrayal, attempted suicide, divorce and as you may have guessed – death. All of it is handled gently, but in a very realistic way. You’ll go through the entire range of emotions while reading this book. I simply cannot recommend it enough.