March: A Love Story In A Time Of War By Geraldine Brooks

1861, the first year of the American Civil War. March leaves his beloved wife and daughters to fight for the Northern forces. Alone in a country ripped apart by violence and hatred, he see things that shake his very soul. He also encounters the woman who had changed his very life nearly twenty years earlier - Grace. She is beautiful, educated, and a slave.

From Louisa May Alcott's beloved classic Little Women, Geraldine Brools takes March, the absent father gone to war, and conjures the story of a passionate man struggling not just to return to the heart of his family, but also to keep his faith - in himself, in his fellow man and in love itself.

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I picked this book up after reading several young adult novels, and it was quite a refreshing change. It's a story about the father Mr March when he went to war. However, it was much more than just that. It also tells the way Mr March met his future wife and also the growing up of his four daughters which precedes the start of Little Women. It also shares the time when he is ill and Mrs March and Mr Brooke travel to see him; this part is swithched to the first person perspective of Mrs March (Marmee).

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This book is also about a deep belief in the freedom of slaves. March is trying to live up to his ideal belief in this and feels horror-struck when people are killed and perhaps he could have done something to prevent their deaths. However, with the help of Grace, who gives him some much needed perspective, he is able to overcome some of his guilt and forgive himself and go on with his life.
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I loved the parts where Mr March, Mrs March and their daughters lives are intertwined with the lives of Henry Thoreau, Waldo Emerson and Nathaniel Hawthorne. Apparently, Mr March is heavily inspired by Louisa May Alcott's father, Bronson Alcott, who was great friends with these writers, who also believed passionately in the freedom of slaves.

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Overall a very honest novel, that explores the life of Peter March with his shattered dreams, and his love for the passionate, hot-tempered Marmee. It is a beautifully written novel that shows the heartache caused by the Civil War knowing that humans suffer.

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I would also highly recommend two of Geraldine Brook's other novels, The Year Of Wonders and The People of The Book, which were also fantastic reads.

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Random Passage: Waldo's wife was the one adult with whom Henry was never awkward or reserved, and to her children he could not have been more affectionate if they had been his own. With my girls, too, he was considerate and interested, and as soon as they were conversible, he elected himself their unofficial tutor in the ways of the natural world and became, perforce, our daily intimate. He delighted to take Meg and Jo into the woods to observe the life within. It was not all science with him: a row of orange fungus was an elven staircase, a cobweb the fairies' lace handkin.