Product Description

From Louisa May Alcott’s beloved classic Little Women, Geraldine Brooks has animated the character of the absent father, March, and crafted a story “filled with the ache of love and marriage and with the power of war upon the mind and heart of one unforgettable man” (Sue Monk Kidd). With “pitch-perfect writing” (USA Today), Brooks follows March as he leaves behind his family to aid the Union cause in the Civil War. His experiences will utterly change his marriage and challenge his most ardently held beliefs. A lushly written, wholly original tale steeped in the details of another time, March secures Geraldine Brooks’s place as a renowned author of historical fiction.

“A very great book... It breathes new life into the historical fiction genre [and] honors the best of the imagination.” —Chicago Tribune
“A beautifully wrought story about how war dashes ideals, unhinges moral certainties and drives a wedge of bitter experience and unspeakable memories between husband and wife.” —Los Angeles Times Book Review
“Inspired... A disturbing, supple, and deeply satisfying story, put together with craft and care and imagery worthy of a poet.” —The Cleveland Plain Dealer
“Louisa May Alcott would be well pleased.” —The Economist

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #1876 in Books
• Published on: 2006-01-31
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 304 pages

From Publishers Weekly
Starred Review. Brooks's luminous second novel, after 2001's acclaimed Year of Wonders, imagines the Civil War experiences of Mr. March, the absent father in Louisa May Alcott's Little Women. An idealistic Concord cleric, March becomes a Union chaplain and later finds himself assigned to be a teacher on a cotton plantation that employs freed slaves, or "contraband." His narrative begins with cheerful letters home, but March gradually reveals to the reader what he does not to his family: the cruelty and racism of Northern and Southern soldiers, the violence and suffering he is powerless to prevent and his reunion with Grace, a beautiful, educated slave whom he met years earlier as a Connecticut peddler to the plantations. In between, we learn of March's earlier life: his whirlwind courtship of quick-tempered Marmee, his friendship with Emerson and Thoreau and the surprising cause of his family's genteel poverty. When a Confederate attack on the contraband farm lands March in a Washington hospital, sick with fever and guilt, the first-person narrative switches to Marmee, who describes a different version of the years past and an agonized reaction to the truth she uncovers about her husband's life. Brooks, who based the character of March on Alcott's transcendentalist father, Bronson, relies heavily on primary sources for both the Concord and wartime scenes; her characters speak with a convincing 19th-century formality, yet the narrative is always accessible. Through the shattered dreamer March, the passion and rage of Marmee and a host of achingly human minor characters, Brooks's affecting, beautifully written novel drives home the intimate horrors and ironies of the Civil War and the difficulty of living honestly with the knowledge of human suffering.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From School Library Journal
Adult/High School-In Brooks's well-researched interpretation of Louisa May Alcott's Little Women, Mr. March also remains a shadowy figure for the girls who wait patiently for his letters. They keep a stiff upper lip, answering his stiff, evasive, flowery letters with cheering accounts of the plays they perform and the charity they provide, hiding their own civilian privations. Readers, however, are treated to the real March, based loosely upon the character of Alcott's own father. March is a clergyman influenced by Thoreau, Emerson, and especially John Brown (to whom he loses a fortune). His high-minded ideals are continually thwarted not only by the culture of the times, but by his own ineptitude as well. A staunch abolitionist, he is amazingly naive about human nature. He joins the Union army and soon becomes attached to a hospital unit. His radical politics are an embarrassment to the less ideological men, and he is appalled by their lack of abolitionist sentiments and their cruelty. When it appears that he has committed a sexual indiscretion with a nurse, a former slave and an old acquaintance, March is sent to a plantation where the recently freed slaves earn wages but continue to experience cruelty and indignities. Here his faith in himself and in his religious and political convictions are tested. Sick and discouraged, he returns to his little women, who have grown strong in his absence. March, on the other hand, has experienced the horrors of war, serious illness, guilt, regret, and utter disillusionment.-Jackie Gropman, Chantilly Regional Library, VA
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From The Washington Post
Early in Louisa May Alcott's novel Little Women, the March girls receive a letter from their father. About this letter, Alcott writes, "little was said of the hardships endured, the dangers faced, or the homesickness conquered; it was a cheerful, hopeful letter full of lively descriptions." Mr. March spends much of Alcott's novel exiled from the story, serving as a chaplain for the Union during the Civil War.

Geraldine Brooks's new novel, March, reverses this. March begins with that same letter as it is written, or one very like it. But in this book the stress falls on the cost of saying little about hardship, danger and homesickness. The effort of writing such a letter underscores one of Brooks's consistent themes -- that the distance between the man at war and the women at home is unbridgeable. Increasingly the family must be protected from what the man has seen and done -- protected from who the man has become.

In one of his letters home, Mr. March, Brook's central character, chooses to focus on the natural world. "Spring here is not spring as we know it: the cool, wet promise of snowmelt and frozen ground yielding into mud. Here, a sudden heat falls out of the sky one day, and one breathes and moves as if deposited inside a kettle of soup." About another letter he says simply that though he promised to write, "I never promised I would write the truth." Today, when the reading of the names of fallen soldiers has been censured as an unpatriotic act, Brooks's decision to show both the details of war and the silence that grows up around those details is timely.

In her previous book, Year of Wonders, a story set during the years of the Black Plague, Geraldine Brooks proved herself to be a wonderful novelist. March has all the same virtues -- clarity of vision, fine, meticulous prose, the unexpected historical detail, a life-sized protagonist caught inside an unimaginably huge event. It shows the same seamless marriage of research and imagination.

When Alcott wrote Little Women, she created a confusion between the real Alcotts and the fictional Marches. Geraldine Brooks continues this fruitful confusion. Among the characters in Brooks's book are the historical (Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, John Brown), the quasi-historical (the Marches), and the fully fictional (Grace Clement, a slave March knew as a young man and meets again during the war).

Mr. March is something like Louisa May Alcott's father, Bronson Alcott, in conviction, though with differences in experience and temperament. Accounts of Mr. Alcott suggest that he was highly principled and maybe a bit parasitic, depending on frequent financial support from his friends and family. In Louisa May Alcott's (and Brooks's) depiction of the character, the principled half is emphasized. Brooks's March is a well-meaning man, highly tuned to the frequencies of his own guilt and inadequacy. The war gives him ample occasion for expiation. It also provides endless opportunities for disastrous new mistakes.

Brooks's version of March's story is both harrowing and moving. She organizes her plot around four interludes. There is an episode from March's youth: At 19, as an impoverished Yankee peddler, he was a guest at a plantation in Virginia. Here he was briefly seduced by the leisurely life of books and philosophy that slaveholders could afford.

A second storyline focuses on the abolitionists in New England. March meets the activist Margaret Day (the Marmee of Little Women) as well as John Brown and the Transcendentalists Emerson and Thoreau.

A third episode takes place in Union-occupied Mississippi, where an Illinois attorney has leased a cotton plantation. The plantation workers are ex-slaves, now entitled to wages, and under tenuous Union protection. As a chaplain in the army, March has proved too radical to suit either his superiors or the troops. He is sent here instead to organize a school for the newly freed and their children.

The issue of the treatment of ex-slaves under Union occupation is one of the less familiar stories of the Civil War, and Brooks is most effective throughout this section. She details the compromises made and the compromises refused while the sense of danger threatening the little community grows ever more palpable.

The final episode takes place in a Union hospital in Washington, D.C. For this part of the story, Brooks switches to Marmee's point of view, a move that brings us suddenly and nicely back to the world of Little Women. The Alcott book and characters have floated like ghosts all through March. That story of scorched gowns, amateur theatricals, pickled limes, balls and picnics and pianos provides a wonderfully effected, unstated but understood contrast to this story of the war. Brooks has taken a chance in evoking it so strongly at the end, but the chance pays off beautifully. March is an altogether successful book, casting a spell that lasts much longer than the reading of it.

Reviewed by Karen Joy Fowler
Copyright 2005, The Washington Post Co. All Rights Reserved.

Customer Reviews

Richly Layered
Here's my advice about reading "March." Skip to the Afterward and read it first. It's just a suggestion, particularly for those not familiar with "Little Women" and its place within the Civil War. I think you'll admire the research and sheer work that went into developing the concept of "March" and, as a result, more appreciative of the arc of the story and the punch it packs. Geraldine Brooks' idea for this book, frankly, is genius and it allows for the combination of solid research about the war and her vivid imagination. How many books of non-fiction and fiction can there be about the Civil War? "March" would suggest that there are few limits, particularly if the vein being mined is this rich. Mr. March's journey through the battlegrounds is the journey of an idealist running smack into reality--and paying the price. At his core, Mr. March firmly believes in the power of knowledge and learning, yet encounters slaves with "hands innocent of pen or quill." He is used to judging people by "how lettered" they are. (I was reading this book as Barack Obama was beginning his transition plans, shortly after the November election in 2008; it made for a fascinating backdrop to consider what was happening 140 years earlier.)

Mr. March encounters all the horrors of the war and yet protects his wife from the bloody details in his letters home--and from his own secrets as well. The result is a richly layered book through the first two-thirds that grows even more depth as Marmee arrives in Washington, D.C. to face the brutality first hand and the "dreadful alchemy" and "empty glory" of war and disease. Her anger is palpable--and covers thousands of years of remorse. "The waste of it. I sit here, and I look at him, and it is as if a hundred women sit beside me: the revolutionary farm wife, the English peasant woman, the Spartan mother--`Come back with your shield or on it,' she cried, because that was what she was expected to cry. And then she leaned across the broken body of her son and the words turned to dust in her throat."

"March" is a brilliant book--I am amazed at how much ground Brooks covers in a fairly short novel and, reading it today, realize its insights apply, vivid and stark as they are.

Beautifully written book.....not so great ending.
I won't go into details about the plot; amazon has already done a pretty decent job at that. What I do want to do is address some of the other reviewers' comments and also talk a little bit about why I gave this book 4 stars and not 5.

First: This book is NOT a sequel to "Little Women." Anyone who complains that "as a sequel to 'Little Women' this book sucks" is, I'm afraid, an idiot who neither owns, nor has access to, a dictionary. "March" is what you would call a revisionist text -- it takes characters and storylines from one story (in this case, Louisa May Alcott's "Little Women"), and uses them to create an entirely new universe of the author's making.

Like most people who have read it, I love "Little Women." Unfortunately, it is somewhat hampered by 19th century conventions regarding what is and is not proper to write about. Written more than a century and a half later, "March" does not suffer from any of those pitfalls. We get sex, violence, and an abundance of passion -- none of which is gratuitous. Most importantly, we get to see the virtuous figures of Marmee and Mr. March, sketched in "Little Women," in a completely new (and far more complex, interesting, and realistic) light.

To get a few other things out of the way: stylistically, Ms. Brooks' writing here is nearly flawless. She has the voice of a poet, without being pretentious, schlocky, or needlessly verbose. On several occasions, her words brought me to tears. Don't trust the words of any reviewer who gripes that the book "is too long" or "drags way too much in the beginning" -- I'm fairly certain the person is either a callow teen or else a supremely ignorant adult who can only stomach things written by authors like Dan Brown.

Here is my beef with this book: SPOILER ALERT!

(1) I wanted to hear more from Marmee. I can't tell you how welcome and refreshing her point of view / narrative was after keeping company with the high-minded, highly naive, and somewhat exasperating, Mr. March, for so many chapters. Her realization that she has been betrayed and lied to for so many years, by her lover, her partner, and her confidante, was for me, the climax of the novel. How would she confront him, I wondered? Would she berate him, shame him, remind him of all that she sacrificed for the sake of his misguided idealism? Marmee never gets her day, unfortunately. A true martyr (more than Mr. March could ever claim to be), she bites her tongue for the sake of her daughters. She remains ever supportive of her husband during his recovery, and provides him with the love and physical comforts he needs to heal and come back home to his family.

(2) I realize that Bronson Alcott (and therefore, Mr. March), was an idealist, a philospher, an intellectual -- in short, a man of the mind, and not of the world. For the most part, I was able to go with the flow and accept him for what he was without judgment or censure. But towards the end of the novel, I started getting angry. While his loyal wife and expectant daughters waited for him to come home, he slowly recovered in a hospital in Washington only to....decide that he would follow Grace, his one-time love, in her duties as a war nurse?? And here's the kicker -- because he feels he is not WORTHY enough to come home to his family?! Selfish is what he is. Basically, we the readers are told that the only reason March goes back to Concord is because Grace tells him to. What a coward. What would his precious daughters think of him if they knew about his deceit, his disloyalty, his inconstancy? In the last pages of the novel he looks at each of his daughters and sees only the slaughtered slaves he left behind in the battlefields. What a father.

Don't get me wrong. This is an incredible book, and very deserving of all the accolades it has garnered. Much like its main character, however, it is imperfect. Read the novel, by all means, and revel in every beautifully crafted and heart-wrenching sentence. But do not expect to come away from the experience with anything less than the feeling that the novel, much like its protagonist, could have come to a better, and far more settling, conclusion.

I Loved Meeting Mr. March And Hearing His Story
This is one of the most Pulizer-worthy novels I've read in a long while. The novel tells the previously untold story of the absent father in Louisa May Alcott's Little Women (Signet Classics). In Little Women, the reader only gets to know Peter March through his letters sent home to his family from the Civil War. Of course, in the interest of sparing his family the details of war, his letters are more cheerful than his reality. Geraldine Brooks uses the novel March to tell of Mr. March's early life as a traveling salesman, of his first kiss with someone other than his future wife, of the meeting of his wife, of his connections to Emerson and Thoreau, of his strong abolitionist sentiments, of the war that changed him both physically and mentally, and of misunderstandings and wrongs that were never made right in his life. Brooks draws heavily from the journals of Alcott's own father, Bronson Alcott, in order to flesh out the character of Mr. March. Since the "little women" in Alcott's novels were based on the members of her own family, it makes sense that Mr. March would be based on her father and that the March family would be acquainted with the same people they were. The Alcotts were, after all, contemporaries and acquaintances of many of the transcendentalist thinkers and writers of the time such as Emerson and Thoreau.

This is definitely the best prequel written by a different author that I've ever read. I remember being completely disappointed trying to read sequels or prequels by different authors for books such as Gone with the Wind. The author's journalistic background definitely helped her to give attention to the proper details needed to research such a book.

I initially did not recognize the name of the author as being the author of Nine Parts of Desire: The Hidden World of Islamic Women, a book that I loved so much that I ... er ... bought it from the library pretending that I'd lost it (in the days before amazon.com made any book accessible for purchase). Nine Parts of Desire is a work of non-fiction that she wrote as a journalist. So I'm thrilled to see that she has such a beautiful piece of fiction out there as well. Halfway through the book, I found myself saying to myself, "wow, this is a good book" and hoping to read something else by her soon.