willal 's review for:

March by Geraldine Brooks

4.5

dark emotional reflective sad slow-paced

Plot or Character Driven: Character

Strong character development: Complicated

Loveable characters: Complicated

Diverse cast of characters: Yes

Flaws of characters a main focus: Yes

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I wasn’t sure about it in the beginning, but it grew on me a lot as I read it, particularly as it shifted to Marmee’s perspective of her husband. The parents in Little Women have always felt somewhat two dimensional to me - likely because, as Geraldine Brooks’ mother apparently said, “Nobody on real life is such a goody-goody as that Marmee.” I really liked reframing them as these complicated people, and that Marmee saw her husband so clearly for who he was (in all his goodness and his faults). 

It also gave me one of my new favorite lines from a novel - the first in a long time to make me write it down and save it: 

"The point is the effort. That you, believing what you believed-what you sincerely believed, including the commandment thou shalt not kill'-acted upon it. To believe, to act, and to have events confound you-I grant you, that is hard to bear. But to believe, and not to act, or to act in a way that every fiber of your soul held was wrong-how can you not see? That is what would have been reprehensible.”