Hello Beautiful is a novel by Ann Napolitano which was published in 2013. The book is a follow-up to her wildly successful 2020 novel, Dear Edward. The protagonist of the novel is William Waters, but his story is filtered through the experiences and adventures of the Padavano sisters: Julia, Sylvie, Cecelia, and Emeline. It is the presence of these four sisters in the life of William that forms the existential foundation of the novel. Napolitano wrote it as a homage to the classic tale of sisterhood, Louisa May Alcott's Little Women.
Like Alcott's famous March sisters, the Padavano siblings are absolutely devoted to one another. Absolutely, but not unconditionally. The conflict in this generational tale derives from the complexity of the social interaction among the sisters relative to Julia's decision to marry William. Also like the March sisters, Julia and her siblings are distinctly different in personality. Sylvie is the idealist who finds adventures in books. Cecelia is the extroverted opposite of Sylvie; a spirited artist who finds joy in sensory contact. Emeline and Julia are also presented as oppositional with the former being the maternal keeper of stability in the family while Julia has ambitions looking far beyond the cloistered design of the domesticity of her childhood.
The narrative is a veritable fountain of potential triggering issues. William comes into the lives of the sisters after a traumatic childhood. He will spend much of the story trying to keep Julia from discovering the dark secrets of his past. Ultimately, they marry and produce a daughter, but despondency sends him to considerations of suicide. Meanwhile, the intricacies of domestic relationships come under the heavy weight of betrayal as one of Julia's sisters eventually falls in love with William. This complication leads to generational conflict taking the form of an estrangement between William and his daughter, Alice. Eventually, the homage to Little Women is complete as the sister who comes between Julia and William is diagnosed with terminal cancer.
Although a homage to Alcott's beloved novel which is one of the all-time bestsellers and seems to produce a new film adaptation every generation, Hello Beautiful is far from merely an updated retelling. It is the marriage of Julia and William and the daughter which is produced by that relationship which takes this novel to another level. In addition, the dark shadow of William's complicated past is an element which Alcott could not even have considered. The novel spans a great deal of time chronologically which allows for illustrating how childhood trauma transforms into adult depression in a parent which cannot help but impact the relationship with children. While it is certainly undeniable that the famous story of the March sisters informs the novel, Napolitano builds upon that foundation to reconstruct it in modern terms and explicitly introduce aspects which Alcott could only come at obliquely if at all.
