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 water.  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