The last Friday of every month this year I’m going to be featuring one of my favorite books. I’ll give a review and say why it’s one of my favorites. You can find the full list here. First up is A Little in Love by Susan Fletcher.

As I wrote about here, Les Misérables is my favorite story ever and never fails to inspire me. Les Mis is full of amazing characters, hope, redemption, and fighting for a better tomorrow. I love everything about this story, especially the character Éponine. And Fletcher’s novel A Little in Love beautifully illustrates Éponine’s heartbreaking story.

Éponine has a very hard life. Her parents were cruel and made her steal. She was forced to be cruel as well to a young girl who came to stay with them, and she has always regretted it. She tries at times to turn her life around—such as committing to doing good deeds when she does bad ones—and she tries hard to change when she falls in love with a boy named Marius. But his love is not returned, and Éponine learns that he has instead fallen in love with the same girl from her childhood, Cosette. Despite everything she has gone through, however, Éponine is granted forgiveness and redeems herself in the end.

I love this book because it takes one of the lesser-developed characters in the story of Les Mis and digs deep into who she is. Fletcher gives us Éponine’s entire history and shows us the reasons she behaves as she does. I enjoy having this chance to understand how Éponine could love someone so much that she would choose his happiness over her own. And I love this beautiful story of forgiveness and redemption. Éponine committed bad deeds in her life, but she chose to change her life and she did.

I also really enjoy this book because I too like to change up well-known stories. Fletcher is an inspiration to me because of how well she accomplishes this. In college I enjoyed rewriting fairy tales into my own versions of them, and I first got started in writing by doing Harry Potter fan fiction. Rewriting your own versions of fairy tales or classic stories like Les Mis can be a great way to get started in writing. It’s fun to take characters and stories you know and make them your own.