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Health & Fitness

Book Nook: March by Geraldine Brooks

Never having read Louisa May Alcott's Little Women, I was nervous about starting March with no understanding of the story that Mr. March, the protagonist, began from. I was quickly wrapped up in March's anguish at leaving his family behind, and the daily effort of concealing from his family just how horribly the war was going and his own failures as a minister to those in need. I became enamored of Geraldine Brooks' turn of phrase, the elegant way that she described even the most despicable depredations, and her creation of this once idealistic now disillusioned, vain, and eventually broken man.

March follows the story of Mr. March who is absent for most of the story of Little Women. (Yes, I had to find a plot summary on Wikipedia). His high morals and tendency to deal more in abstracts than the actual day to day business of anything, have him leaping to volunteer to minister to local Massachusetts boys during the Civil War. He remarks at certain times of the story that his poor wife, Marmee, was so loving and understanding and so passionately caught up in the abolitionist movement that she silently encouraged him to go forward with this idea before he himself knew it was what he was going to do. Unfortunately, the war is nothing like what he expected. He is a failure as a minister, butting heads with his regiments Calvinist surgeon and Catholic soldiers. Forced to apply to work with the runaway and freed slaves as a teacher, he tries to make the best of the situation only to find himself involved in terrible events that lead to his injury and subsequent invalid state. 

It is hard not to care for a man who spent his whole life chasing the ideals he espoused only to see himself a miserable failure at every venture he set his hand to. Once living in comfort and financial security, he squandered his money away unwittingly funding John Brown's raid on Harper's Ferry leaving his family in an almost destitute situation. At the same time that you, the reader, feel the most sorry for the deplorable state that March has arrived in, Brooks does something brilliant. She interjects Marmee's point of view into the story. As reader's we are encouraged to believe that the narrator is telling us the truth, and while March never exactly lies, we never really understand the hardships that his family have been put through until we encounter Marmee's tightly held rage at her husband's antics and her own inability to sway him from his choices. 

This is one of the most human, touching, and heartrending stories that I have read. It is no wonder that she won the Pulitzer Prize for this work. It takes a classic piece of literature (even though I chose not to read it, I still think of it as a classic) and expands upon it in a way that helps to create an amazingly dense and rounded view of families, war, human tragedy, suffering, and hope. I would wholeheartedly recommend this book to any fan of history, good stories, or just for someone looking "for something good to read." The story is fairly short, moves quickly, and has such an engaging and evocative tone that you can't help but be touched by the trials and tribulations of the March clan.

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