No Little Women 
 Although I greatly admired Geraldine Brooks' earlier novel, 
 Year of Wonders 
 (despite its slightly rabbit-from-the-hat ending), I was wary of starting this one, since I knew its title character, March, was based upon the absent father in Louisa May Alcott's Little Women, a book that I have never read. I need not have worried; Brooks' novel stands confidently by itself and supplies any back-story that is necessary. I have always been put off (perhaps in my ignorance) by what seemed an aura of Victorian sentimentalism surrounding the Alcott books, so when March began with a letter home from the battlefield written in exactly this vein, I almost threw it down. But again I need not have worried; the general tone of March is far from sentimental; one of its major themes, indeed, concerns what cannot be said in a letter home, and the unbearable pressures and unintended dishonesties which result from the wholesome desire not to bring pain to those one loves. Meg, Jo, Beth, and Amy may be safe with their mother Marmee in their simple home in Concord, but the experiences of their father further South are anything but a children's tale. 
 Brooks wries that her novels are about "faith and catastrophe"; this was true of Year of Wonders, but it comes much closer to home here. While ostensibly filling in the story of the fictional March father from Little Women, absent with the Union army in the Civil War, Brooks goes way beyond some literary what-if. Extending the quasi-autobiographical nature of Alcott's book, she draws upon the real-life character of the novelist's father, Bronson Alcott, a transcendentalist philosopher, educator, and utopian idealist, the friend of Emerson and Thoreau. But since this is fiction, the character may be made younger and emotionally vulnerable, thrust into the fighting, and, even more searing for him, brought into contact with the "liberated" slaves on former plantations. The result is to expose the moral ambiguities of the war and slavery in a manner approaching the power of Edward Jones' The Known World, and test the emotional honesty and moral courage of this noble but imperfect man of peace almost to breaking point. 
 A rich and complex book, highly recommended. For further discussion, see my review of E. L. Doctorow's The March.