His Little Women Author:Judith Rossner Copyright 1990 — In her first novel since AUGUST, Judith Rossner, a master storyteller with a wicked eye for detail and a superb ear for dialogue, presents the spellbinding saga of Hollywood producer Sam Pearlstein, a womanizer of infinite charm, and his four daughters by three wildly different wives. — Sam left his first wife and his oldest daugh... more »ter, Louisa, when Louisa ws five. She grows up to be a writer who abandons her own family and comes looking for him. Nell, Sam's second "little woman," is the daughter of the beautiful, vague, self-absorbed movie star Violet Vann. Nell and Louisa meet when Louisa is an adult and Nell a teenager, by which time the woman Sam married when he left Violet has had two daughters.
In an era when it has been proclaimed that all women are sisters, Judith Rossner probes the question of what it means to be someone's sister - or half-sister - as well as what it means to be the daughter of a powerful man. She is concerned, too, with the way in which family members grow up and leave home, yet continue in some sense to work out their problems with one another in the social and business world.
All the little women's conflicting rivalries and affections come to a head when Louisa writes a best-seller, and a man she swears she never knew brings a libel suit against her. The family emotions that complicate the suit give Judith Rossner her best day yet - in court and out of it.
HIS LITTLE WOMEN is as penetrating as a psychologist's report, as romantic as a Victorian novel, as much fun as a barrel of monkeys..« less