{"id":18192,"date":"2012-08-09T13:44:04","date_gmt":"2012-08-09T17:44:04","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/bookdragon.si.edu\/?p=18192"},"modified":"2014-05-15T22:00:43","modified_gmt":"2014-05-16T02:00:43","slug":"march-by-geraldine-brooks","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/apa.si.edu\/bookdragon\/march-by-geraldine-brooks\/","title":{"rendered":"March by Geraldine Brooks"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"March<\/a>“‘I’ve always imagined paradise as something like a library,'” the titular March expounds. Is that not a perfect thought?<\/p>\n

Alas, while\u00a0March<\/em> is\u00a0Geraldine Brooks<\/a>‘ most award-winning\u00a0\u2013 that yellow circle on the cover announces its\u00a02006 Pulitzer Prize<\/a>\u00a0\u2013 I must confess it was my least favorite; if I had to rank Brooks’ fiction, I’d go with\u00a0Year of Wonders<\/em>,\u00a0Caleb’s Crossing<\/em><\/a>,\u00a0People of the Book<\/em><\/a>, and then finally\u00a0March.<\/em><\/p>\n[If you choose to listen to March<\/em>, you’ll be read to smoothly enough\u00a0by Canadian actor Richard Easton, with only the occasional overwrought moments (perhaps accurate to the text, but a bit too much stuck in the ears). As countless audibles have multiple narrators, I was surprised that Easton also reads Mrs. March’s chapters, a production decision that seemed unnecessarily dissonant.]\n

Many of you probably have read Louisa May Alcott’s canonical\u00a0Little Women<\/em>, or at least seen some production of it, either on film or the stage. In\u00a0March,\u00a0<\/em>Brooks attempts “to create a character for the absent father,” who in Alcott’s original, is away serving the Union troops as a minister in the south during the Civil War. As Alcott based\u00a0Little Women<\/em>\u00a0on her own family, Brooks “turn[ed] to the journals, letters, and biographies of Alcott’s father, Bronson,” to create her own Mr. March.<\/p>\n

Brooks’ Mr. March “goes off to war at the ridiculous age of thirty-nine,” as his wife observes. An idealistic thinker and passionate abolitionist, March’s wartime experiences with slaves, soldiers, civilians, and survivors \u2013 including his reunion with a remarkable woman he met 20 years earlier with whom he shares horrifying secrets \u2013\u00a0prove brutal, wrenching, and almost fatal. His difficult letters home to his little women are interwoven with his own remembrances of things past, from his travels as an itinerant 18-year-old peddler from Connecticut to a pencil-making apprentice to husband, father, scholar, preacher, rich man, poor man in Massachusetts. As he tries to make sense of the devastations of war, he’s forced to rethink his beliefs, his actions, his very life.<\/p>\n

So why did March\u00a0<\/em>drop to the bottom of my Brooks list?\u00a0Perhaps my contrary nature is blinding me, but Mr. and Mrs. March both, for all their admirable ideals and convictions, are ultimately unsympathetic characters. The mister’s guilty whimperings and self-lashings begin and end the book, while the missus’ ‘no-really-I-don’t-blame-him-but-woe-is-me-anyway’ whining overwhelms her short four chapters. Surely Alcott had reason to leave Mr. March a minor character, and Mrs. March secondary to her four daughters … given how they turned out in Brooks’ imaginings, to keep them from center stage was probably the wiser choice.<\/p>\n

Tidbit<\/strong>: One of my favorite books ever is\u00a0Wide Sargasso Sea<\/em>, in which Jean Rhys gives unforgettable voice to the madwoman in the attic from\u00a0Charlotte Bront\u00eb’s\u00a0Jane Eyre. Sea<\/em> is one of many, many parallel novels, as this genre is called, which includes such notables as Valerie Martin’s Mary Reilly<\/em> (from Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde<\/em>); Alice Randall’s The Wind Done Gone<\/em> (from Margaret Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind<\/em>); Gregory Maguire’s Wicked<\/em> (from L. Frank Baum’s\u00a0The Wonderful Wizard of Oz<\/em>) or his Confessions of an Ugly Stepsister<\/a><\/em> (from\u00a0Cinderella<\/em>);\u00a0and even Michael Cunningham’s (overrated 1999 Pulitzer Prize-winning) The Hours\u00a0<\/em>(from Virginia Woolf’s\u00a0Mrs. Dalloway<\/em>).<\/p>\n

Readers<\/strong>: Adult<\/p>\n

Published<\/strong>: 2005<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

“‘I’ve always imagined paradise as something like a library,’” the titular March expounds. Is that not a perfect thought? Alas, while\u00a0March is\u00a0Geraldine Brooks‘ most award-winning\u00a0\u2013 that yellow circle on the cover announces its\u00a02006 Pulitzer Prize\u00a0\u2013 I must confess it was my least favorite; if I…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":27213,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[5,6,60],"tags":[6608,22,1563,24,13,1593,129,39,1594,44,146,45],"class_list":["post-18192","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-adult-readers","category-fiction","category-nonethnic-specific","tag-bookdragon","tag-civil-rights","tag-geraldine-brooks","tag-historical","tag-love","tag-march","tag-mother-daughter-relationship","tag-parent-child-relationship","tag-richard-easton","tag-siblings","tag-slavery","tag-war"],"yoast_head":"\nMarch by Geraldine Brooks - BookDragon<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/apa.si.edu\/bookdragon\/march-by-geraldine-brooks\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"March by Geraldine Brooks - BookDragon\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"“‘I’ve always imagined paradise as something like a library,'” the titular March expounds. 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