Geraldine Brooks
Fiction 2005/ 280 pages
I don’t know, I just couldn’t quite enjoy this book. The plot is wonderfully inventive. This is the story of March, who is the father of Louisa May Alcott’s four little women, Meg, Jo, Amy, and Beth. The storyline takes place in two venues/timelines, one when March is 39 and leaves his young women and his wife Marmee at home in Concord, Massachusetts. He signs up for the Civil War as an idealist, a vegetarian, an abolitionist, an anti-slavery and pro-freedom revolutionary, and a chaplain. The other story is about 20 years earlier when he meets and marries Marmee and begins to have daughters. It is perhaps the plot itself, as creative as it is, that sours the book for me. Having read Little Women decades ago, I love the chapters where March is home with his family.
I find the chapters that tell the story of the Civil War to be boring, horror filled, brutal, barbaric, grim, sad, powerful, and violent, coupled with March’s debilitating inability to be a chaplain neither he nor his charges can be proud of. Though, when he begins to teach young black children their letters, he finds his purpose and comes into his own.
Brooks is, of course, a magnificent writer. Perhaps I am simply done with stories about past wars, at least for a while.
I can recommend this book to lovers of Geraldine Brooks. It is another one of her many masterpieces. Enjoy March. If you read it and love it, I would be pleased to read your review of it.
June 2026
In December 2020 I reread Little Women. It was Covid time and I had recently watched all four movie adaptations. Comments from my reading journal “Whew – this was a slow read. Glad I did it but don’t need to do it again – ever!” The edition of LW I had offered details about its author. Alcott was a pioneer for women writers, raised and educated unusually for the time. She did not like LW and resented having to end it (by publisher’s instance) with Jo getting married.
I read March almost a year later. Thought it was fantastic. By telling the story of his early life before marriage when he was an itinerant peddler coming in contact with a variety of people and social situation, finally acheiving financial success and losing it by supporting John Brown’s efforts to building a self-sufficient Black community, it gave me a better understanding of the political and social views of the March family and how the girls were raised. His meeting of Marmee and their relationship gave me a different perspective on the character who was so saintly in LW (books and movies). She is a much more fully developed character and more likeable and real.
I agree, Andrea, the author doesn’t spare us in describing the cruelties of war, slavery and attitudes of whites toward those of other color. March is a complex personality and the author’s depictions of his post-battle guilt and PTSD are stark.
Glad I’m at home right now with access to my reading journal. I can always tell from it when I really like a book – I write a long entry.
I like your perspectives, Mary. Thank you for sharing! I never was a Little Women fan … enjoyed much more Little Men. Who was a tomboy??
I remember talking with you about Little Women v. Little Men. I also preferred the male story.