Follow the lives of the March sisters, who are forced to pull together when their father leaves to fight in the war. But will the girls cope when disaster strikes and their mother has to leave too, or will their changing world pull them apart? This edition, written by Katie Dale has all the warmth of Louisa May Alcott's original classic.

Pearl/Band 18 books offer fluent readers a complex, substantial text with challenging themes to facilitate sustained comprehension, bridging the gap between a reading programme and longer chapter books.

Text type: Fiction from our literary heritage

Curriculum links: English: fiction from the literary heritage

This book has been quizzed for Accelerated Reader.

This book is part of a book series called Collins Big Cat .

. This book is part of a reading scheme, meaning that it is a book aimed at children who are learning to read. This reading book uses the phonics method. This approach concentrates on teaching children how to map between sounds and spellings, allowing them to decode written words into their constituent sounds. Phonics skill thus involves being able to split the written word 'cat' into the phonemes /k/, /a/, /t/, and to map from letter 'c' to phoneme /k/, from letter 'a' to phoneme /ae/ and from letter 't' to phoneme /t/. Decoding skill is useful when reading unfamiliar words which use regular spelling sequences.

There are 80 pages in this book. This book was published 2016 by HarperCollins Publishers .

Katie Dale had her first poem 'The Fate of The School Hamster' published in The Cadbury's Book of Children's Poetry, aged 8 and hasn't stopped writing since. On graduating, she went travelling through South-East Asia - only to discover whilst in a Vietnam internet cafe that she was a winner of the SCBWI 2008 Undiscovered Voices competition. Glenys Nellist was born and raised in a little village in northern England. The author of multiple children's books, including the bestselling `Twas the Evening of Christmas and the popular series Love Letters from God and Snuggle Time, her writing reflects a deep passion for helping children discover joy in the world. Glenys lives in Michigan with her husband, David. Learn more at glenysnellist. com. Elena Selivanova graduated from the Moscow State University of Printing Arts and has worked for twenty years as a children's book illustrator. She has illustrated over one hundred books and has created a wide variety of memorable and beloved characters. Collins UK has been publishing educational and informative books for almost 200 years. Jonathan was born in 1965, the son of a rig fitter and a primary school teacher. He first developed his skills as a writer and illustrator while studying architecture, illustrating poems and lyrics that he had written. After leaving college, he worked as an architect for several years, before pursuing a career in children's books. In addition to writing books such as Bringing Down the Moon, and Ruby Flew Too, he also paper-engineers pop-up books.