The trouble with novels about the Civil War is that they are bound to follow a requisite formula, and Geraldines Brooks’s Pulitzer-winning March is no exception. All the familiar scenes, themes, and elements are there: lonely letters home, the smoke-filled chaos of battle, stealing a dead person’s boots, whipping a slave, selling a slave’s family members, a slave revolt, Southern gentility, Northern rough manners, soldiers trashing the plantation, buildings burning, having no food but root vegetables, and the mandatory amputation of limbs with hand tools.

Full review posted on Rose City Reader.

As March is the 2006 Winner of the Pulitzer Prize, I was inclined to buy and read this novel as I am out of ideas on what to read next.

Against the backdrop of the Civil War, I found it interesting to read about the happenings in Virginia (where we moved from), especially when towns / cities are named and their conditions given: racism, discrimination and hatred.

Most appealing: the character is the father from “Little Women” and in this book (no I haven’t read it nor care to actually) upon the father’s return, all his daughters sit around him, joyous upon his return from the war and ask the most inconsiderate questions such as, how different do I look to you? what about so and so … how different does she look to you? how have I changed in your opinion? notice anything different about ME?

Not once do this little brats ask their father how different he feels, or how fighting the Civil War has changed him personally.

In March, all these questions are answered as it follows him from youth to the moment he returns home to Concord, MA. It is told from the perspective of the father who leaves for war, experiences so much (pain, hatred of whites, love for blacks, adultery, failure and in the end, self-doubt).

The idea is not unlike Wicked by Gregory Maguire where the perspective is the untold story of the Wicked Witch of the West.

Finally, a voice for the unspoken, miffed yet wholesome and monumental characters silenced by the author’s opinion of whose voice the audience wants to ‘hear’.

Good read indeed but not one I’m hanging onto …

I enjoyed this historical fiction set in the early 19th century and in the early years of the U.S. Civil War. I liked reading about the Underground Railroad, John Brown, and the transcendentalist movement (Thoreau, Emerson). I think it helps to have read Little Women first so March’s descriptions of his wife and daughters become more familiar.

The book didn’t grab me; The story or the character. I found the language taking itself too seriously for my taste.

Another book that I approached with trepidation, for three reasons: as I write this, people in Canada don’t seem to like it, it’s based on another book that I haven’t read, and it’s supposed to be very good.

Well, I enjoyed it immensely, and if the crazy Christmas Holiday things weren’t happening, I’d’ve sped through it. As far as I can tell, not having read Little Women isn’t a problem, although if I’d read it, I probably would’ve enjoyed seeing where the pieces fit together. Still, Brooks does a good job of establishing how Mr. March is colouring his accounts of the war so as not to disturb the ladies back home (and so as not to embarrass himself too much). The book provides a better insight to the conditions of the slaves during the time of the American Civil War than I’d had before, and does a good job of showing the range of attitudes that the Whites had toward the Blacks at that time. The story would’ve been slightly more believable if a few coincidences could’ve been done away with, but the offences weren’t particularly egregious, especially compared with some books I’ve read recently.

Well-written, accessible, and very interesting.

Yet another book by a woman that was a very pleasant surprise. I really didn’t think I wanted to read a historical novel about the civil war, but Geraldine Brooks proved me wrong.

This book is an excellent read, and reasonably quick (not least because I was unable to put it down once I had started it). I’ve never read “Little Women”, and have never really wanted to (another reason why this book was such a nice surprise), but this book is just superb. That it uses “Little Women” as a starting point is almost incidental, but it’s an interesting thing to have done.