When I read this book as a young thing, probably late primary school (so, shall I guess, age 10?) this was a fascinating book that had lots of interesting things to say about social interaction, feminism, and raising healthy children, and there were lots of things that were new and interesting to me. 

Now, in my 50s, I find it a tiresome book, with not enough to say. The author explains some of the short comings, in that it was published serially, and bringing it all together doesn't particularly manage a good story, and I was some willing to forgive the unevenness. It helped that this makes each chapter nicely self-contained, and good for slow reading. 

It is not a bad book, per se. But it is very didactic, and while Alcott had a lot of forward thinking ideas that I greatly appreciated reading as a quiet young thing, I don't feel the need to revisit. The early parts of the book I enjoyed for nostalgia reasons, but then as the stories went on there was more about women's role in society that I didn't want to read - about housework, and nursing, and being the social conscience, and I can see that while young me got some good ideas in terms out of this, I also had some unhealthy attitudes about 'ladylike behaviour' reinforced. Plus we have mostly two young women, the protagonist who we are supposed to emulate, and then the far too fashionable young woman who we are supposed to disdain, for being more conventional. 

In the negative: some very classist commentary which made me very uncomfortable. Some casual racism - I think at the point I got to the only non-white characters were Chinese, but I'd been skimming rather a lot, and it is quite possible that some of the servant characters were black and I'd entirely missed that detail. And that really annoying trope of education == intelligence, such that the one who is fluent in French looks down on the one 'just' studying it, and later describes themself in deprecating terms because they don't study Greek and Latin.