March - Geraldine Brooks

March is a civil war era historical fiction told from the perspective of Mr. March, an abolitionist and a chaplain who accompanies the Union Army. The story takes us through the atrocities committed by slave owners, the senseless suffering of everyone impacted by the way and the moral compass of people on all sides of the war. Most of the novel is narrated by March, and alternates between his present day circumstances in the battlefield and helping people impacted by the war, and his past as a trader and head of the March household.  An idealist, March struggles to compromise his beliefs against the backdrop of the injustice surrounding him and is often at odds with those in charge around him. The plot is pretty much his experiences during the war and how it impacts him and the people in his life.

The novel won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 2006, and it's easy to see why, as the prose of Geraldine Brooks flows as beautifully as ever. Brooks' successfully transports us to the bygone era with a highly accurate description of the settings, dialect and attitudes of the time. It also encourages a lot of thought in terms of whether the characters behavior was right or wrong, how much sacrifice is appropriate and who is truly impacted by the sins of those before them. Where the novel falls flat is with the characters, none of whom came across as especially compelling or heroic. March, who is imagined as the missing father from Little Women, seems like a downright liability at most times, but then maybe - it's just how Brooks envisioned him to be, just that from the point of view of a reader, it didn't make for interesting reading. And another thing that is a weakness is that the novel is full of civil war era tropes like the cruel slave owner, the abused but intelligent and beautiful slave girl, the brave black man who sacrifices himself for the white rescuer and of course the idealistic white hero himself! 

However, at the end of the day, it's still a good read if only for Brooks' writing, the prodigious amount of research effort she has put in (which is a theme of all her books) and for the fact that it's bound to go down as a classic of its time.