Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

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