March

By Geraldine Brooks

Book Overview

As the North reels under a series of unexpected defeats during the dark first year of the war, one man leaves behind his family to aid the Union cause. His experiences will utterly change his marriage and challenge his most ardently held beliefs. Riveting and elegant as it is meticulously researched, March is an extraordinary novel woven out of the lore of American history. From Louisa May Alcott’s beloved classic Little Women , Geraldine Brooks has taken the character of the absent father, March, who has gone off to war, leaving his wife and daughters to make do in mean times. To evoke him, Brooks turned to the journals and letters of Bronson Alcott, Louisa May’s father—a friend and confidant of Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau. In her telling, March emerges as an idealistic chaplain in the little known backwaters of a war that will test his faith in himself and in the Union cause as he learns that his side, too, is capable of acts of barbarism and racism. As he recovers from a near mortal illness, he must reassemble his shattered mind and body and find a way to reconnect with a wife and daughters who have no idea of the ordeals he has been through. Spanning the vibrant intellectual world of Concord and the sensuous antebellum South, March adds adult resonance to Alcott’s optimistic children’s tale to portray the moral complexity of war, and a marriage tested by the demands of extreme idealism—and by a dangerous and illicit attraction. A lushly written, wholly original tale steeped in the details of another time, March secures Geraldine Brooks’s place as an internationally renowned author of historical fiction.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0670033359
• ISBN13: 9780670033355
• Release Date: March 2005
• Publisher: Viking Books
• Length: 288 Pages
• Weight: 1.17 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.0" x 6.4" x 9.6"
• Age Range: 18 years and up
• Grade Range: Postsecondary and higher

Customer Reviews

Beautiful Novel of a Familiar Character

I was prompted to read "March" by Geraldine Brooks when the novel recently won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and I'm sure glad I did! It's a remarkable novel, beautifully written, interesting, educational, emotional, thought-provoking, riveting and it has that wonderful and comforting touch of the familiar because just about every woman and girl (and even some males!) in America already knows the March family. I won't re-hash the plot; suffice it to say that Brooks offers us a unique view of the Civil War and one that will stay with the reader long after the last chapter. I'd love to see this novel taught in schools along with "To Kill a Mockingbird", I hope some forward thinking teacher will try it. In addition to this exceptional story, I recommend "The March" by E.L. Doctorow, which was short-listed for the Pulitzer and provides another riveting look at the Civil War with vivid and varied characters from both sides and from both races and ways of life. And just one last, quirky recommendation; for a work of juvenile fiction that touches on the transcendentalists of Concord, Mass., (Alcott, Emerson, Thoreau) I recommend with joy "The Swing in the Summerhouse" by Jane Langdon. It was my first glimpse into that world and it's a story that is loved by at least two generations now.

The March Family Made Human

I loved this novel, and could not put it down. Itl chronicles the experiences of the "Little Women's" absent father, providing accounts of his travels in antebellum Virginia, his courtship of the intense and rebellious Marmee, his love for a slave woman, his attempts to retain his ideals as a soldier during the Civil War, and the difficulties of adjusting to life in Concord after he is discharged from the army. The characterizations are complex and multi-dimensional; readers of Alcott's works will particularly enjoy the portrayal of Marmee as an independent thinker. Ms. Brooks was a war correspondent in Somalia and Bosnia, and spares nothing in her narrations of the battle for the bluff, guerilla attacks on camps of "contraband slaves," and the horrendous conditions of wartime hospitals. However, none of these descriptions are gratuitous. Rather, they serve to a)educate the reader on how unprepared--ideologically, materially, and logistically--the United States was to receive former slaves into society and b) remind us of how fortunate Americans are not to have experienced war on our soil in 140 years. Highly recommended.

Good fictional story in spite of some revisionist history

This recent novel by Geraldine Brooks displays her passion for journalism. Here, the fictional character from Louisa May Alcott's "Little Women", the absent father, Mr. March, who is off fighting in the Civil War, is given center stage. Coupled with scrupulous research of the time period and her wildly creative imagination, she fashions a riveting tale. She captures the sights, the sounds and the smells of a long-gone period of time that has shaped America forever. Some of it is based on the writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau who were friends of Louisa May Alcott's father. And I do believe she encapsulated perfectly the historical realities of the time, especially in Concord, where abolitionist families hid runaway slaves in an underground railroad and there was constant intellectual discussion about the politics around them. We get to meet Mr. March as a young itinerant Connecticut peddler in the South years before the Civil War. He's in the bloom of youth and attracted to a slave girl. Inevitably, he gets to sees first-hand the injustices of slavery. Later, we watch him romance and eventually wed the outspoken Marmee. We see his joy at the birth of his four daughters, and watch his faith rise as his fortunes get fritted away with misplaced investments in John Brown's failed ventures, cumulating in the tragedy at Harper's Ferry which was supposed to be a slave rebellion. All this is told in flashback, as he writes letters home to his family, hoping to spare them the horrors that he sees every day during the War. There were aspects of the Civil War story I had never heard of before. For example, as a Union Chaplain and teacher, Mr. March was sent to a plantation that had been abandoned by its Southern owner and became a refuge for runnaway slaves. A northerner had leased it and was actually paying the former slaves a wage although their treatment under this new plan was not much better than under the old system. Also, the man who had leased the plantation seemed at first to be cruel and unjust, but as the book continued, we soon learned of his hard choices and he turned into complex and interesting character. I was totally swept up in the story and couldn't put the book down despite the occasional feeling I had that some of the history was a little too revisionist. But this is a novel and not a true story, and the writer's view of the world is through modern eyes. I understand and do forgive her for this just because the story was so good. In spite of its faults, I loved this novel and was sorry to see it end. Recommended, especially for history buffs and fans of Louisa May Alcott.