February Book Suggestion
Hello Girls,
Hope everyone had a wonderful Thanksgiving holiday!!! I wanted to give you guys a heads up on a suggestion for the February book club.
I was looking for books to read on the plane (I am going to Tanzania over Christmas break to climb Mt. Kilimanjaro!) and I came across March by Geraldine Brooks.
This book looks fantastic and it is intertwined with Little Women which we all LOVED. Definitely bring suggestions for books to the December meeting, but this is definitely my 1st pick!
This book received the 2006 Pulitzer Prize in Fiction. I have included a synopsis below:
As the North reels under a series of unexpected defeats during the dark first year of the American Civil War, one man leaves behind his family to aid the Union cause. His experiences will utterly change his marriage and challenge his most ardently held beliefs. Riveting and elegant as it is meticulously researched, March is an extraordinary novel woven out of the lore of American history.
From Louisa May Alcott's beloved classic Little Women, Geraldine Brooks has taken the character of the absent father, March, who has gone off to war leaving his wife and daughters to make do in mean times. To evoke him, Brooks turned to the journals and letters of Bronson Alcott, Louisa May's father, a friend and confidant of Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau.
In Brooks’s telling, March emerges as an idealistic chaplain in the little known backwaters of a war that will test his faith in himself and in the Union cause as he learns that his side, too, is capable of acts of barbarism and racism. As he recovers from a near mortal illness, he must reassemble his shattered mind and body, and find a way to reconnect with a wife and daughters who have no idea of the ordeals he has been through.
Spanning the vibrant intellectual world of Concord and the sensuous antebellum South, March adds adult resonance to Alcott's optimistic children's tale and portrays the moral complexity of war, a marriage tested by the demands of extreme idealism, and by the temptations of a powerful forbidden attraction.
Geraldine Brooks talks about March: "In the early 1990s I went to live in a small village in rural Virginia. For someone raised in Sydney, it was strange to suddenly live in a place where the scars of a war endured all around me. There were bullet holes in the bricks of the local church where a Civil War skirmish had taken place; a Union soldier’s belt buckle was unearthed in our backyard.
Thinking about the young man who had worn that buckle was the beginning, in my mind, of March. The village is Quaker, which meant those who lived there were pacifists, but they also were abolitionists, who hated slavery. So the war brought huge issues of conscience for individuals who had to decide whether to sacrifice their non-violent principles to fight for what many saw as a just cause.
I began to imagine an idealist adrift in the Civil War, and that reminded me of Little Women, and the absent father ‘far away, where the fighting was’. This isn’t a book about war, but about the strength of ideas that drive people to extreme action. I am gripped by the stories of individuals from that generation Oliver Wendell Holmes described so eloquently when he said, ‘In our youth our hearts were touched with fire’.’ Sometimes, when I stand in the field about the village and the mists rise from the creek, I feel like a time traveller, born back by the spirits of all those vivid, missing boys. "
