March brooks book review6/2/2023 ![]() ![]() ![]() Spanning the vibrant intellectual world of Concord and the sensuous antebellum South, March adds adult resonance to Alcotts optimistic childrens tale to portray the moral complexity of war, and a marriage tested by the demands of extreme idealismand by a dangerous and illicit attraction. 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. 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. To evoke him, Brooks turned to the journals and letters of Bronson Alcott, Louisa Mays fathera friend and confidant of Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau. Riveting and elegant as it is meticulously researched, March is an extraordinary novel woven out of the lore of American history.įrom Louisa May Alcotts 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. His experiences will utterly change his marriage and challenge his most ardently held beliefs. ( 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. ![]() Winner of 2006 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction ![]()
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