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March

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Publisher
Viking
Date
Award Winners
Historical
Literary
Winner of the Pulitzer Prize

From Louisa May Alcott's beloved classic Little Women, Geraldine Brooks has animated the character of the absent father, March as he leaves behind his family to aid the Union cause in the Civil War. His experiences will utterly change his marriage and challenge his most ardently held beliefs.

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Positive
Based on 8 reviews

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What The Reviewers Say
Rave
The Chicago Tribune
I believe Geraldine Brooks' new novel, March, is a very great book. I believe it breathes new life into the historical fiction genre, the borrowing-a-character-from-the-deep-past phenomenon, the old I-shall-tell-you-a-story-through-letters tradition. I believe it honors the best of the imagination. I give it a hero's welcome … The book's protagonist, one Mr. March, has, in other words, been borrowed twice--first from a beloved novel (a novel that was extrapolated from Alcott's own life) and second from history. He is, however, no mere pastiche; Brooks has magnificently wielded the novelist's license, shifting some facts and superimposing the demands of story over the sometimes less-compelling signposts of the past … However brilliant it is, the conceit of March is only part of its glory. It's the story, as it always must be the story, that qualifies March for supreme (forgive the adjective) greatness.
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Rave
The Washington Post
When Alcott wrote Little Women, she created a confusion between the real Alcotts and the fictional Marches. Geraldine Brooks continues this fruitful confusion. Among the characters in Brooks's book are the historical (Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, John Brown), the quasi-historical (the Marches), and the fully fictional (Grace Clement, a slave March knew as a young man and meets again during the war) … The final episode takes place in a Union hospital in Washington, D.C. For this part of the story, Brooks switches to Marmee's point of view, a move that brings us suddenly and nicely back to the world of Little Women. The Alcott book and characters have floated like ghosts all through March. That story of scorched gowns, amateur theatricals, pickled limes, balls and picnics and pianos provides a wonderfully effected, unstated but understood contrast to this story of the war. Brooks has taken a chance in evoking it so strongly at the end, but the chance pays off beautifully.
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Positive
The San Francisco Chronicle
As March's shadow story emerges from behind the veil where Alcott left it, alternately braiding up with hints in the original version and striking out on a path of pure invention, Brooks reimagines Little Women afresh. It's a sterling example of a brazen genre – the novel that burrows inside another novel, borrowing some of its characters and situations but, in this uncommon case, returning to the host book a liveliness that age and fashion had sapped … Brooks keeps a firmer footing when reanimating not historical characters, but fictional ones. Marmee takes over much of the telling when Mr. March lies near death in a Washington hospital, and her demure yet willful voice carries Brooks' story confidently toward its reunion with the narrative we already know.
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