March

My favorite book is Little Women. So I came into this book with high hopes – the story of Mr. March sounds like a wonderful idea. Instead, this turned out to be one of the few books I didn't want to finish, although I did keep going in hopes that things would turn around. The result of the book is that I like Mr. March less. I also read in the afterward that Geraldine Brooks's mother told her, “Nobody in real life is such a goody-goody as that Marmee,” which I think is a gross mischaracterization of Marmee from Little Women, and it seemed to shape the way Brooks decided to portray Marmee in her book. It would have been interesting to me to see how Marmee, who admits to Jo as to having a temper, learns to corral that passion into care for her daughters and community. Instead, Brooks creates a Marmee who seems to be always seething under the surface and who has been made to be smaller by both herself and her husband.

An additional note about Marmee is that I always interpreted “Marmee” to be a version of “mother,” whereas Brooks introduces Marmee as having had that nickname from childhood as a version of Margaret. That makes no sense to me; why would her own children call her by her nickname?

Finally, the actual Civil War was horrific, and I can't even imagine the terrors that the soldiers and the enslaved went through. But I am also not interested in reading the gratuitous violence portrayed in these pages. I barely made it through the first chapter, which is one of the reasons I almost gave up on this one. I'm sure the writing was more accurate to the actual experience, but it was too much for me.