Book Review | March by Geraldine Brooks

March: A Love Story in a Time of War – Buy this book

Rating

5 stars – a powerful and moving experience

Description

As the North reels under a series of unexpected defeats during the dark first year of the war, one man leaves behind his family to aid the Union cause. His experiences will utterly change his marriage and challenge his most ardently held beliefs. Riveting and elegant as it is meticulously researched, March is an extraordinary novel woven out of the lore of American history.

Why did you choose to read this book?

I’ve recently read some very positive reviews of this book written by fellow book bloggers and thought it worth adding to my TBR. It’s the first book I’ve chosen for the I Heard it Through the Grapevine challenge.

The Book Review

Readers of L.M. Alcott’s Little Women may recognise March as the father who leaves his beloved wife and little women to fight for the Northern Forces in the American Civil War. While Alcott’s novel revolves around the family left at home, Brooks’ novel focuses on the events that face March during the year of his absence.

The novel is well written, introducing us to March’s teenage years and the events that lead up to the courtship and marriage of his wife Marmee; we also follow his travels through the war where events unfold that he cannot write home about. In the second part of the novel the vantage point shifts and we find ourselves in Marmee’s shoes, to understand her side of the story and how she perceives the events that lead back to the family being reunited on Christmas Day.

This book is beautifully written, Brooks certainly knows how to draw a reader in with her prose and a pace of events that keeps you enthralled, wondering what might happen to the characters March meets along the way.

It’s been many years since I read Little Women, but having finished this book I’m planning to re-read the novel that was the prompted Geraldine Brooks to write such a beautiful story.

Book Exploration

What was different or unique about the story’s setting and did it enhance or detract from the story?

The story is set in 1861, the first year of the American Civil War. Brooks uses real life people and events as the basis of her tale, and these help to ground the story and give it meaning. I admit to knowing very little – perhaps nothing – about the Civil War before reading this book, but found myself looking up more information about the events as they unfolded. Since reading To Kill a Mockingbird I seem to be reading more and more novels about slavery and every time I feel angered and outraged that people could have been treated so differently just because of the colour of their skin. I’m becoming more appreciative of novels both old and new that spin their stories around true-life events and do such a powerful job of reminding us about our history and prompting us to think more deeply about past events.

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