Table of Contents
PENGUIN BOOKS
MARCH
Geraldine Brooks is the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of March and Year of Wonders and the nonfiction works Nine Parts of Desire and Foreign Correspondence. Previously, Brooks was a correspondent for The Wall Street Journal in Bosnia, Somalia, and the Middle East. Born and raised in Australia, she lives in rural Virginia with her husband, Tony Horwitz, their son Nathaniel, and three dogs.
Praise for March
March is a beautifully wrought story about how war dashes ideals, unhinges moral certainties and drives a wedge of bitter experience and unspeakable memories between husband and wife.
-Los Angeles Times Book Review
Clarity of vision, fine, meticulous prose, the unexpected historical detail, a life-sized protagonist caught inside an unimaginably huge event. [March] shows the same seamless marriage of research and imagination.... Brookss version of Marchs story is both harrowing and moving ... March is an altogether successful book, casting a spell that lasts much longer than the reading of it.
-Karen Joy Fowler, The Washington Post Book World
Pitch-perfect writing.
- USA Today
Researched with great historical thoroughness, March hews faithfully to the spirit of Alcotts original.... [March] enhances rather than appropriates its sister work from 1868. Louisa May Alcott would be well pleased.
-The Economist
It is harder, sometimes, to review a glorious book-to convey its power and influence without relying on suspicious adjectives. Good books can be slotted, characterized, explained; great books often cannot. 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 heros welcome.
-Chicago Tribune
Powerful
-The Boston Globe
March is a first-rate historical novel.... It feels honorable, elegant and true, an adult coda to the plangent idealism of Little Women.
- The Dallas Morning News
The pictures that Brooks paints of the war-ravaged South, particularly on the liberated plantation, are haunting. This richness, of time and place and of Marchs unrelenting struggle to live up to the man he thinks he should be, makes March a spellbinder. The picture is not simple, neither in terms of the life nor in the emotions of its principals. It is, however, compellingly honest. It is the feeling that the reader is witness to truth that elevates March beyond a gimmick to an engrossing, thought-provoking tale.
-The Denver Post
Brilliant ... It is this disconnection between the inner self (what one knows and feels) and outward presentation (what one allows others to see and know of oneself) that provides this wonderful novel with dazzling narrative tension.... It is this struggle for balance-between being human and being principled-that is Brooks brilliant creative stroke. From the intimidating virtues of the March sisters, its clear that Alcott favored principles. But thank goodness for Geraldine Brooks: She allows her characters to be human. And in the end, they have more to teach us.
- The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Brooks has written a gripping story of an impossible time, and simultaneously a neat deconstruction and reconstruction of one of American literatures best-known families.
-The Oregonian (Portland)
Richly imagined ... This meticulously researched and well-crafted book reveals that atrocities occur on both sides in war, leaving countless innocent victims, and that even the most seemingly dedicated often have feet of clay.
-Rocky Mountain News
When I learned the subject of this novel, I felt a twinge of envy. How inspired to fill out Mr. March, absent from nearly all of Little Women but, as a chaplain in the Civil War, probably up to something quite as interesting as the tribulations of his four daughters at home.... [I]n March, Brooks dares to create a man of his times, who believes that curbing his wife is among his proper duties as a husband. She also allows him to be as self-righteous as might be expected of someone with his fervent, high-minded convictions.
-Christina Schwarz, The Atlantic Monthly
Its lively history, the sort that jumps off the page and wont let you go. Brooks talent lies in her ability to bring life and personality to history.
-Milwaukee Journal Sentinel
Inspired ... A disturbing, supple, and deeply satisfying story, put together with craft and care and imagery worthy of a poet.... I picked up March because I liked the idea of the book. I closed the cover loving its execution.
-The Cleveland Plain Dealer
Brooks has achieved something extraordinary in her new novel. It is powerful yet entertaining, and thought-provoking as it breathes life into something familiar. And for all the hardship and suffering it contains, March is most abidingly a story of redemption, one of heartfelt depth and humanity.
-The Charlotte Observer
[T]he vivid description of battles and atrocities is equal to any found in The Red Badge of Courage and Andersonville.... This is a gripping historical novel, brave enough to reveal the gray areas of politics and war. Although set in the nineteenth century, theres a timeless relevance to the novel. That, coupled with Brooks powerful command of language and her ability to create engaging minor characters, firmly establishes her as a writer to watch.
-Rocky Mountain News
March is a hugely successful novel, both for the history it reframes and the all-too-human lives it captures. Brooks adept language and her enviable ability to give adequate historical reference without weighing down the narrative place her new novel alongside her first-which is quite a feat.
-The TImes-Picayune (New Orleans)
March] is a wholly original and engrossing story about a man whose lofty principles are scorched by his failings during the Civil War.
- The Christian Science Monitor
Stunning ... Fascinating and meticulously researched ... Masterfully depicted.
-BookPage
Luminous ... Brooks affecting, beautifully written novel drives home the intimate horrors and ironies of the Civil War and the difficulty of living honestly with the knowledge of human suffering.
-Publishers Weekly (starred review)
For Darleen and Cassie- by no means little women.
PART ONE
Jo said sadly,
We havent got father, and shall not have him for a long time. She didnt say perhaps never, but each silently added it, thinking of father far away, where the fighting was.
-Louisa May Alcott, Little Women
CHAPTER ONE
Virginia is a Hard Road
October 21, 1861
This is what I write to her: The clouds tonight embossed the sky. A dipping
