March by Geraldine Brooks Summary and Reviews
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Book Reviews of March
Book Review: A Historical Fantasy (Civil War) with Moral Dilemna
Summary: 4 Stars
This book is the author's fantasy version of the life and times of Peter March, father of the "Little Women." You may recall that in "Little Women" the father is absent. Well, this book weaves a tale of where he's been.
Mr. March, a non-denominational pastor, goes off to war to help the fighting boys of the North. Mr. March has no intention of engaging in fighting, but rather to provide spiritual support to the troops. However, he finds that in war it's not possible to stay out of the conflict.
As an abolishonist, Peter March firmly believes in the North's cause. Throughout this story he is meeting, hiding, befriending, and teaching slaves and former slaves. His engagement in the Civil War is exhausting physicially and emotionally. It even makes him begin to doubt his faith.
I highly recommend this book. It's not "The Year of Wonders," but it's still a good read.
Book Review: A Literary Spin Off
Summary: 3 Stars
Geraldine Brooks' story of what happened to the missing father from "Little Women" is beautifully written. Conflicted by his desires to end slavery and maintain peace, Mr. March enlists as a chaplain only to find that the commitments to the war's cause of those around him are muted if even existent. The challenges surrounding this make for a difficult year for Mr. March, yet almost bull-headed in his attempts, he continues to push for what he believes.
The story that Ms. Brooks has created is constructed around the few pieces of information available about Mr. March in Louisa May Alcott's "Little Women." I am not sure if that makes Ms. Brooks' effort more or less clever. On the one hand, unlike authors who approach their work with a blank slate, Ms. Brooks had to make the novel work in the context of another author's roadmap. Conversely, one could argue that the outline for the story was already there due to Ms. Alcott's efforts, and all Ms. Brooks had to do was fill in the blanks. Some might make a modern day comparison with Michael Cunningham's use of "Mrs. Dalloway" in writing "The Hours." However, his creation was fundamentally different in that the story of "Mrs. Dalloway" was used to reflect on the life of the original novel's author, and then was also transported into the future as a construct for the tales of two women not actually present in "Mrs. Dalloway."
Regardless, "The Departed" just one Best Picture, so if you're going to give an Oscar to a remake, why not a Pulitzer to a literary spin off.
Book Review: A Powerful New Perspective
Summary: 5 Stars
March by Geraldine Brooks provides a painful but powerful perspective on the Civil War. The story is told from the perspective of Mr. March, the father from Little Women. In the original novel by Louisa May Alcott, the father is only a shadowy, figure, sketchily drawn. We only know that he was captured by the Confederate army and is later welcomed home by his family. Mrs. March is only seen as "Marmy," a sweet but innocuous woman who quietly holds her family together. This revised version of the story fleshes out these two characters, giving them depth and complexity. Through their eyes, we delve deeper into the complexities of abolition and the Civil War, and explore the difficulty of communicating between a husband and wife during turbulent and morally ambiguous times. This is a painful, yet riveting book to read, as figures from history such as Emerson and Thoreau come alive. There are only shades of gray in this book, as issues and ideas of what are right and wrong become confused and vague. I strongly recommend this book for those who are avid historians or fans of the original novel. You will never view history or Little Women the same way again.Book Review: A Pulitzer is not enough
Summary: 5 Stars
This is a wonderful story. The hook, of course, is that it is about Mr. March (Alcott) and what he is doing while he is away during the course of the story told in Little Women. But that trivializes this wonderful, gripping, rending, engrossing story. There is much more here than ever there was in Alcott's book (as good as it was) and this book goes well beyond its device to deliver wonderful insight into the human condition, the complexities of war, the horror of slavery, the failings of idealism and much more.
Very highly recommended.
Book Review: A Thoroughly Absorbing Novel
Summary: 5 Stars
March by Geraldine Brooks, is a fascinating and thoroughly absorbing novel in which the author imagines the life of Mr. March, the absent father from Louisa May Alcott's "Little Women." One does not have to have read Alcott's nineteenth century children's novel to appreciate this tale of the very proper and high-minded preacher leaving his wife and four daughters behind as he goes off with the young men to the battlefields of the Civil War as their chaplain.
Part One of the book, roughly three-fourth of it, is told in the voice of Mr. March and his letters home to his beloved wife, Marmee, in which he tries to hide his feelings about the death and destruction taking place around him. Assigned to work in a makeshift hospital on the Clement estate, a plantation he had visited more than twenty years earlier as an itinerant salesman, he meets again Grace, a beautiful and cultured slave and the woman who had given him his first kiss.
The once beautiful estate has been transformed by the ugliness of war, but March's work there is brief, as he is assigned to set up a school for freed slaves working for wages on another plantation called Oak Landing. In flashbacks, the reader learns of March's earlier life, his courtship of Marmee, his work in the underground railroad, and his friendship with the Transcendental writers, Emerson and Thoreau.
After a Confederate attack on the plantation, March comes down with a fever and is taken to a Washington hospital. Here, the narrative switches to the voice of Marmee, for a different take on the past and her reaction to the truth she uncovers about her husband's life.
Much of March's character is derived from Alcott's transcendentalist father, Bronson, though he did not go off to war. It is the war and its horrors and their impact on a good man's life that give Brooks' novel the ring of truth and make it such a gripping read.