Comment

March

a Novel
Mar 03, 2012DeltaQueen50 rated this title 4.5 out of 5 stars
I have been nervous about reading March by Geraldine Brooks, even though I have enjoyed her previous novels, as I have such a strong attachment to Little Women and I feared Brooks’ vision wouldn’t agree with mine. I am happy to report that other than minor differences, Geraldine Brooks has delivered an excellent, moving story of how a man of conscience experienced the Civil War over the course of one year. The author draws on her own experience as a war correspondent to vividly describe both battle scenes and conditions in a realistic way. Through the eyes of Peter March, we are able to picture the small events and narrow views of one man’s war experiences. As a chaplain he is mostly dealing with the wounded , the sick and the dead. Being a man of such strong anti-slavery convictions and being totally against violence, he spends a lot of his time wrestling with the morality of war and his own guilt. Not be able to accept even the most casual racism that was prevalent even on the Yankee side, he soon found himself transferred from the regular army to a captured Plantation to deal with the education of ex-slaves. I was a little taken aback with Brooks view of Marmee, but as I read deeper into the book, her interpretation grew on me and seemed right. I haven’t read Little Women in years, but I now realize, that the Marmee depicted in that book is too good, too saintly to be real. This author saw beneath the veneer and gave the women flesh and blood. In the end I loved this story of a naïve dreamer going to war and having to face his own shortcomings, and learning the lesson of what is important in life. March by Geraldine Brooks deserves it’s Pulitzer Prize, and is a book I am proud to have share the shelf with the original Louisa May Alcott novels about this family.