Geraldine Brooks' March Received the Pulitzer Prize in 2006

But it Could Have Been a Stronger Book

Like many paperbacks these days, Geraldine Brooks' Pulitzer Prize winning novel March (Penguin Group, 2005) begins with several pages of praise. "Beautifully wrought," says the Los Angeles Times, "meticulous prose" and "unexpected historical detail," says the Washington Post, "breathes new life into the historical fiction genre," says the Chicago Tribune.

This praise is well deserved. Brooks has taken the idealistic Mr. March, absent during most of Louisa May Alcott's 1868 classic Little Women, and shows in gritty and highly accurate detail how those who step into the chaos of a cause with the best of intentions are often incapable of doing what must be done in the real world to activate their high principles. Mr. March leaves for the war on the adrenaline high of a parade, thinking he should go with the men to minister to them. But his radical faith is not to their liking and he's of little help. He fails, or thinks he fails, both the soldiers under his charge and the slaves he expects to liberate and, in the process, educate.

When Brooks set out to write her novel People of the Book (released in 2008) about the people who risked their lives to save the real Sarajevo Haggadah, she looked for gaps in the known historical record where her fictional characters could live and breathe. This, she has also done with Little Women, making room for a fully described father to Jo, Meg, Beth and Amy that Alcott didn't bring to light in any of her semi-autobiographical novels about the March family.