March by Geraldine Brooks
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This year’s Pulitzer winner for fiction is a slim
novel that follows the mostly absent father from Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women. Mr. March becomes a chaplain in the Union Army during the Civil War, but his radical beliefs on abolition don’t fit well with military discipline. As the war advances south, March begins ministering to “contraband,” the former slaves who continue working cotton plantations for the benefit of the Northern army. Not much of a Civil War buff, I came to March expecting a dry period piece, but found myself engrossed from the first chapter. Through Mr. March’s eyes, we get a thrilling view of the occupied South during a largely unseen hour in American history, and the letters he exchanges with his wife Marmee reveal a complicated marriage between two passionate idealists. The book’s language is stately but fierce, planting unshakable images in your mind: ravaged plantations, broken soldiers, and the fire in John Brown’s eyes. Review by Mark David Bradshaw
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