Book Review: March, by Geraldine Brooks

Pulitzer Prize for Fiction Reading List, #3 (Winner, 2006)

I read March in about 5 hours of low-grade feverish sickness. Leave it to a bad cold to allow me to burn through three books in two days. I could barely move or breath, but March seeped into me. A lover of Civil War history and Little Women already, it was probably meant to be -- but I'd already had one aborted attempt to read it, so I was scared, a bit, I guess.

Geraldine Brooks' prose is terrifically convincing, and pulls you into the book so swiftly you don't even notice that it's happened. The story, for me, was nearly an afterthought, so taken in was I by the language of it all. It reads, not like a book about the 1800's, but like a book written in the 1800's. That's no small feat, and many others' attempts to do just this are not only failures, but embarrassing ones at that. No failures here. The plot lays out in front of me even now as I sit here, thinking on it. Not just a re-imagining of our literary past, but a new imagining of it which is beautiful.