March: A Novel [Hardcover]

Geraldine Brooks (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: March 7, 2005

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.

Editorial Reviews

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.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 288 pages
• Publisher: Viking Adult; First Edition edition (March 7, 2005)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0670033359
• ISBN-13: 978-0670033355
• Product Dimensions: 9.5 x 6 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 3.9 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (214 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #341,163 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Geraldine Brooks is the author of People of the Book, March and Year of Wonders and the nonfiction works Nine Parts of Desire and Foreign Correspondence. Previously, Brooks was a correspondent for The Wall Street Journal, stationed in Bosnia, Somalia, and the Middle East. She lives in rural Virginia with her husband, author Tony Horowitz, and their son.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

241 of 256 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Beautifully written, but not for everyone..., June 29, 2005

By 

Cynthia K. Robertson (beverly, new jersey USA) - See all my reviews
(TOP 500 REVIEWER)    (VINE VOICE)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: March: A Novel (Hardcover)

I fell in love with the writing of Geraldine Brooks when I read Year of Wonders, so I was anxious to tackle her new novel, March. While I found the story beautifully written and richly moving, it won't appeal to everyone.

Brooks takes the well known story of Little Women (Louisa May Alcott) and weaves a tale centering on the absentee father and husband, Peter March. March starts out as a Yankee peddler, but the abolitionist movement eventually spurs him on to become a preacher. He marries Marmee, and they have four daughters. Alcott's father, Bronson Alcott, provides the blueprint for the Reverend March, and his good friends are Concord neighbors Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau. When the Civil War begins, March feels it his duty to enlist-even though he well past the age of the average soldier.

March is a man of high ideals and unreachable dreams, but his many flaws keep him from always acting in a noble or heroic manner. His efforts during the war are both heart warming and tragic. Brooks gives us a glimpse of some little-known aspects of the war including the running of seized plantations by northern men and former slaves (contraband). Sometimes conditions weren't much better than working under southern plantation owners. We also get to see a bit of the abolitionist movement as well as the Underground Railroad.

Brooks writes March in the first person (all but several chapters in Peter's voice). You can read each sentence and feel the beauty of 19th Century written and spoken words. But sometimes, this becomes plodding and the plot is slow to develop at the beginning. I can imagine some readers giving up. Also, while I thoroughly enjoyed March, I might have had an even greater appreciation if I had read Little Women.

The Afterword provided a good chuckle. Brooks' husband is Tony Horwitz of Confederates in the Attic. She apparently loathed his extensive Civil War research. But in the Afterward, she apologizes for refusing to get out the car at Antietam, for whining about the heat at Gettysburg, and for complaining about the shelf space needed to house his Civil War book collection. To our benefit, it now appears that she has been bitten by this same obsessive bug

133 of 146 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Good fictional story in spite of some revisionist history, May 8, 2005

By 

Linda Linguvic (New York City) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (HALL OF FAME REVIEWER)    (TOP 500 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: March: A Novel (Hardcover)

This recent novel by Geraldine Brooks displays her passion for journalism. Here, the fictional character from Louisa May Alcott's "Little Women", the absent father, Mr. March, who is off fighting in the Civil War, is given center stage.

Coupled with scrupulous research of the time period and her wildly creative imagination, she fashions a riveting tale. She captures the sights, the sounds and the smells of a long-gone period of time that has shaped America forever. Some of it is based on the writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau who were friends of Louisa May Alcott's father. And I do believe she encapsulated perfectly the historical realities of the time, especially in Concord, where abolitionist families hid runaway slaves in an underground railroad and there was constant intellectual discussion about the politics around them.

We get to meet Mr. March as a young itinerant Connecticut peddler in the South years before the Civil War. He's in the bloom of youth and attracted to a slave girl. Inevitably, he gets to sees first-hand the injustices of slavery.

Later, we watch him romance and eventually wed the outspoken Marmee. We see his joy at the birth of his four daughters, and watch his faith rise as his fortunes get fritted away with misplaced investments in John Brown's failed ventures, cumulating in the tragedy at Harper's Ferry which was supposed to be a slave rebellion. All this is told in flashback, as he writes letters home to his family, hoping to spare them the horrors that he sees every day during the War.

There were aspects of the Civil War story I had never heard of before. For example, as a Union Chaplain and teacher, Mr. March was sent to a plantation that had been abandoned by its Southern owner and became a refuge for runnaway slaves. A northerner had leased it and was actually paying the former slaves a wage although their treatment under this new plan was not much better than under the old system. Also, the man who had leased the plantation seemed at first to be cruel and unjust, but as the book continued, we soon learned of his hard choices and he turned into complex and interesting character.

I was totally swept up in the story and couldn't put the book down despite the occasional feeling I had that some of the history was a little too revisionist. But this is a novel and not a true story, and the writer's view of the world is through modern eyes. I understand and do forgive her for this just because the story was so good.

In spite of its faults, I loved this novel and was sorry to see it end. Recommended, especially for history buffs and fans of Louisa May Alcott.

90 of 99 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars (3.5)A father's commitment to his "Little Women", March 7, 2005

By 

Luan Gaines "luansos" (Dana Point, CA USA) - See all my reviews
(TOP 500 REVIEWER)    (VINE VOICE)    (HALL OF FAME REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: March: A Novel (Hardcover)

Taking a page from the classic Little Women, Brooks considers the possible fate of Mr. March, the father from Louisa May Alcott's novel, gone to the Civil War while his dutiful family waits behind. In difficult financial straights since an injudicious investment, March's family has adapted to their reduced fortunes, valuing the fruits of the mind over material possessions, all convinced "that the greater part of a man's duty consists in abstaining from much that he is in the habit of consuming."

A learned man who has traveled the country in his youth, Mr. March is later content to raise his four daughters in a pastoral landscape in Concord, Connecticut, with esteemed neighbors and fellow philosophers Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau. For her part, Mrs. Marsh (Marmee) is an abolitionist in spirit and action, while many northerners are still mired in discussions about the morality of slavery. A long-time member of the Underground Railroad, Marmee is fondest of her husband's nature when he supports her anti-slavery convictions with equal fervor.

Although older than most Union soldiers, Marsh joins the war effort as a chaplain. Broad-minded to a fault, March extends comfort to the injured and dying, torn by the violence around him and the extreme youth of soldiers on both sides. While Marsh believes the war is motivated by the noble effort to free the slaves, he is not oblivious to other realities involved and many of the Union soldiers are there by conscription.

The dialog is perfect, relative to the era and prone to prodigious verbiage. Nor is March suffering from a lack of moral persuasion, so conscience-riddled as to be a bit of a bore, rich in character if not in goods. However, excessive wordiness is also the flaw in this novel, an exercise in moral demagoguery that is appropriate to the age, but often tedious and lacking in passion. One wants March (and his beloved Marmee for that matter) to be a bit more human. For every flawed decision March agonizes over, he suffers equal self-flagellation. Even after a nearly mortal illness, March perseveres, pulling himself together lest his family be sullied by his faults.

On the positive side, the naive beliefs of the abolitionists are examined, revealing the barbarism and sadism that exist in any war. There is profit to be made, exploitation of the unfortunate and greed in excess, regardless of noble intent. Prejudice is not constrained by geography, righteousness a flagrant cloak, frequently hiding the truth of war.

Most of the novel is in first-person perspective, but final chapters are from other viewpoints, Mrs. March and the ex-slave, Grace Clement, where the novel finally comes to life. If only the entire book offered this occasional change of perspective. Instead, March carries the burden of the plot; unfortunately, it is the reader's burden as well. Brooks is an excellent writer, with the potential to enliven historical perspective. In future novels, I hope the author's characters are allowed to breathe humanity into the facts that cost the blood of thousands. Luan Gaines/ 2005.