Reviewed by Renée Bosman, Reference Librarian for Government and
Public Affairs In this beautiful novel, Geraldine Brooks
breathes life into Mr. March, the father in Louisa May Alcott's
beloved Little Women. As March is largely absent from Alcott's
story, it is Brooks who truly introduces us to this character
whom we follow from his youthful days as a peddler in the south
to his post as a Union chaplain in the Civil War — first
ministering to soldiers and later as the teacher at a contraband
farm. Self-taught scholar, passionate abolitionist, and
unorthodox clergyman, March is modeled on Alcott's father,
Bronson Alcott, with inspiration drawn from his own papers, as
well as those of friends Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David
Thoreau. Narrated in the first person by March (with some
chapters from wife Marmee's point of view), this very personal
account of war, with all its brutality, inhumanity, and both
physical and emotional suffering is quite disturbing, and
difficult to read at times. Yet it is nicely int