March by Geraldine Brooks

Greetings!

Since I just finished a book, I thought I'd write about it and possibly jumpstart this book blog. I'm not sure if any students have read Little Women by Louisa May Alcott, but many of you might have seen the movie that came out a few years ago. Anyway, this book is about the father in that novel who has left Marmee and her four "little women" at home to join the Union army during the Civil War. He's an absent character in the novel/movie, but the women are definitely affected by his absence.

This novel looks at the character's reasons for leaving his quiet corner of Massachusetts (Concord) and living his ideals about ending slavery in the South. He's actually much too old to fight, but he goes as a minister to the MA troops. It follows his experiences as he deals with the horror of war, and how it affects his beliefs about his own idealism and truths about who he thought he was. It also includes letters home to his wife and girls and pulls in bits and pieces from the lives of the family that occurred in Little Women.

I liked the book, with its many references to actual people/events of the time (Nat Turner, Thoreau and Emerson and Hawthorne, Lincoln and the Underground Railroad). It won the Pulitzer Prize in 2006, and I'm not sure if I agree that it deserves that high honor, but it was still a good story. Brooks writes it in the style of 19th century writers, so some of the vocabulary is out there, but you don't have to pull out the dictionary to figure out what is going on. If you like historical fiction or if you remember Little Women, you might want to give this book a try.