YMMV / Eight Cousins

• Fair for Its Day: By 19th-century standards, the book is quite modern:
  • Alec bans corsets and patent medicines, encourages Rose to get fresh air and exercise, teaches her human biology, and shows her how to manage her own accounts.
  • Phebe grows up to earn her own living as a choir singer (even though she does give it up to marry Archie, she freely chooses to do so and there's the fact that she finally can start building a family of her own, which is important to her what with having been an orphan) and is treated as an equal by Rose, Alec, and the boys (if not the aunts).
  • When Kitty looks up to Rose as a Cool Big Sis, Rose notices that she's not the brightest crayon in the box, and encourages her to study and improve her mind. And Kitty does.
  • There's a great deal of period-specific twaddle in the first book about Rose's duty to be a good feminine influence on the boys - but as adults, when Charlie tries to build a relationship on this by claiming her as a Morality Chain, both Rose and the narrative firmly reject the idea.
• Ho Yay: Rose and Phebe, her maid, "enjoy each other like a pair of lovers."
• Moment of Awesome:
  • When Mac finds out that Kitty's brother Alf is teasing Charlie and trying to force him to drink, his reaction is pulling a Big Damn Heroes and first knocking the drink away from Charlie, bellowing at Alf to stop, then calming down and standing up for Charlie among the guys. Considering that Mac is a quiet bookworm, everyone's reaction was "OH SHI--"
  • Also, Rose firmly refusing Charlie's apologies when he screws up a little too much, in a scene that comes across as almost startlingly modern.
    • "My heart is my own, to dispose of as I please... You have no claim on me but that of cousinship, and you never will have until you earn it. Remember that, and neither threaten nor defy me anymore."
  • Phebe nurses the gravely ill Uncle Alec back to health, pretty much bringing him back from the doors of death and finally earning the approval of the aunts.
• Tear Jerker: When Alec explains to Rose why he's her guardian, telling her about The Promise he made to George right before he died.
  • Also, Phebe and Archie's Star-Crossed Lovers deal and Charlie's death.
• Values Dissonance:
  • The wildly condescending, cutesy treatment of the Chinese people and their culture (which was a thousand or so years older than Alcott's at that point). Rose, about to be introduced to a couple of merchants, specifically mentions being sure she'll laugh at 'their funny slanty eyes'^note 'slanty' is removed from most modern editions and the otherwise unusually progressive Uncle Alec doesn't say a word. Specifically, newly-arrived teenager Fun See, nicknamed Mr. Tokio (... UM), is described as a walking Fu Manchu cliché, and Rose refers to him as "a heathen Chinese". This does not, at least, seem to have been maliciously intended; by the sequel Fun has become engaged to Rose's ditzy comedy-relief friend Annabel, which is treated as a continuation of the merry joke. ("By Confucius! Isn't that a sweet prospect?!" Mac laughs when asked to picture Annabel setting up housekeeping in Canton.)
  • Then there's the whole Kissing Cousins deal, where nobody bats an eyelid at the idea of Rose marrying any of her male paternal cousins. In fact, it's heavily encouraged by their aunts and uncles; there are several references to keeping Rose's inherited fortune 'in the family' (a common real-life rationale for these kinds of marriages at the time) and while Uncle Alec rejects this idea as mercenary, he does explicitly tell his brother Mac that the boy cousins are really the only ones he thinks are suitable for her.
  • Charlie's alcoholism is handled with a sense of shame that is liable to strike readers as slightly OTT given the current understanding of it as a disease rather than purely a moral failure, which was the consensus then. Rose's nigh-anguished reaction when he comes in drunk on New Year's Eve (she can't even bring herself to say the word) is lampshaded by the narrator, approvingly, as the result of her unusually pure and idealistic mindset.
  • Uncle Alec says that Rose's vanity is a flaw she must work to correct. The thing is, all she does is blush and thank him for saying she looks pretty. Later, the boys all tell off Rose for getting earrings and trying to hide them, because earrings are a symbol of vanity. She later gives them up to convince Charlie (and Archie, though he needs less convincing) not to smoke. Quite a few cultures pierce children's ears when they are babies, and in the twenty-first century they are seen as commonplace.