Audiobook · read by volunteers
Jack and Jill
Louisa May Alcott (1832–1888)
Read by Mary Anderson · 24 chapters · 9 h 40
About the book
Two friends, Jack and Jill, go sledding on the first good snow of the season, and a tumble leaves them both injured and confined to bed for many months. What might have been a dull stretch becomes a time of invention. Parents and friends fill their days with Christmas preparations, a theatrical production and many other ways to cheer them up, and they also learn a good deal about patience, kindness and one another. Louisa May Alcott fills her story with the energy of real children and the cheer of a New England winter. Twenty-four chapters and nearly ten hours, read by a LibriVox volunteer, make an affectionate book for the whole family. It is a book for winter evenings, full of games, secrets and small acts of courage. Readers who like a story told at an easy pace will feel at home.
Introduction
Louisa May Alcott (1832 to 1888) is best known for Little Women, but she wrote many other books for young readers, and Jack and Jill, published in 1880, is one of the most appealing. The title comes from the old nursery rhyme, and the book opens with the same kind of accident: two children go up a hill and come tumbling down.
Alcott uses the accident as the starting point for a story about a village community and its young people. The chapters follow the weeks in bed, the visits from friends, the small crises of the sickroom and the changing seasons. She is interested in how children learn from one another, and in how misfortunes can bring out unexpected strengths. As in all her books, there is a gentle moral purpose, but it is delivered with humor and warmth.
The recording has twenty-four chapters and runs for nearly ten hours. It is read by a LibriVox volunteer. For readers who love Little Women and its sequels, it offers a different world, a village rather than a household, but with the same attention to the details of daily life. It is a pleasing and peaceful listen for long evenings, and a good choice to share with children who enjoy stories of friendship and games. The book also shows Alcott's gift for turning the games and chatter of children into real literature, and for treating their concerns seriously. Families will find that it makes a good story to share in installments, with each chapter a small episode in its own right.
Public domain
Louisa May Alcott died in 1888: the work is in the public domain in Switzerland, more than 70 years after the author’s death.
The LibriVox volunteers dedicated this recording to the public domain.
Sources : LibriVox page · Files at the Internet Archive · Original text