March

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. Annotation

Winner of the 2006 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction The New York Times - Thomas Mallon

Geraldine Brook's second novel is in every important way less accomplished than her first, Year of Wonders (2001). That book, which dealt with the assaults of plague on a 17th-century English village, derived some of its power from the way its resourceful heroine came to suspect the biological essence of the calamity she was up against: ''Perhaps the Plague was neither of God nor the Devil, but simply a thing in Nature, as the stone on which we stub a toe.'' Fearlessness -- and experimentation with herbs -- saw her through and won a reader's respect. In March, the ferocious nemeses conjured by Brooks are war and slavery, which, unlike impersonal disease, end up prompting the author and her characters toward a prolonged moral exhibitionism.More Reviews and RecommendationsBiography

Journalist and author Geraldine Brooks won the Pulitzer Prize in fiction in 2006 for March, a novel that imagines the wartime experiences of the absent father in Louisa May Alcott's beloved classic Little Women.More About the AuthorCustomer ReviewsReader Rating: Ratings: 45Reviews: 22See All ReviewsNot "my" Geraldine Brooksby LifeExamined

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December 12, 2009: I became infatuated with Brooks with "Book" and fell in love after reading "Year". "March" left me nonplussed. I think it is a topic not of interest to me, not her.

I Also Recommend: Year of Wonders, People of the Book. thoughtful and inventiveby Anonymous

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December 06, 2009: took Mr. March out of Little Women scenerio and gave him a life of his own. Brings the Cival War to life thru Mr. March in a different way. Also deals with racism and the ethos of slavery and how it relates to where we are today in our nation. quite inventive and insightful. A bit hard to read at first until you get used to the manner of the prose. But worth the read. Good for a book club.