“Her face weary but
smiling. I felt the grip of her will like a gaff plunged deep in me: she had
been determined to see this day. She would have me back in the boat, she would
keep this craft, our family, afloat, together, not matter how damaged my state,
or her own, no matter how uncertain the seas.”
Winner of the 2006 Pulitzer Prize for
fiction, March retells Louisa May
Alcott’s classic novel Little Women
from the point of view of the girls' absent father, an abolitionist chaplain whose
conscience forces him to leave his family in New England to serve in
the American Civil War. Captain March’s journey spans several decades and
covers, through flashbacks, time spent in the South before the war and his
subsequent courtship of his beloved Marmee, as well as the brutality and
injustices he witnesses both on and off the battlefield in 1862. The second
part of this historical love story is told by Marmee herself, who nurses March
back to health in Washington then brings him home, where he must reconnect with
his daughters who have no idea what he has been through. The misunderstandings
and sacrifices that characterise the March’s married life are described in
affecting detail, and Brooks’ use of contemporary letters and journals as
source material lends a sense of real period accuracy.
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