March by Geraldine Brooks is about Louisa May Alcott's Little Womens' dad. Part one is written from his point of view and part two is the viewpoint of his wife Marmee. How much do you remember about Little Women? I'm not going to re-read it just to refresh my memory, but one thing I haven't forgotten was that in Little Women Marmee was a goody-goody quiet woman. Well, think again. In this story she has strong opinions about abolition of slavery and has a feisty temper. She especially does not get along with Aunt March.

Mr. March made a fortune as a Yankee peddler in the southern states. He leveraged this and they were well-to-do until he loaned a lot of money to John Brown (that Harper's Ferry guy who tried to start a slave insurrection) for a farm where freed slaves could live and make a living. It wasn't a success, so the investors lost their money and Mr. March also paid off some of John Brown's debts. So by the time we meet the family in Little Women they are poor, and no end in sight.

March was an abolitionist, their home was a stop on the underground railroad, and he buddied around with Waldo Emerson and Henry Thoreau. Mr. March was a minister of sorts and preached a lot against slavery. He was almost 40 when the Civil War started but he got so carried away in his farewell speech to local troops he decided to join the army as a chaplain. Nobody in his army unit liked him - some of it because he didn't belong to an organized religion - so he was kicked out of his unit and they let him go work on a plantation as a school teacher for freed slaves. Until rebels and former slaves who were helping them came and killed a lot of people and took several of the former slaves back into slavery.

There are a few places where the story line in this book intersected with Little Women, and it's a little contrived, but I got over it.

In the Afterword, the author tells us she patterned Mr. March after Louisa May Alcott's father, who was most of those things - a abolitionist and buddy of those other famous guys but he didn't join the army in the Civil War.

Oh, and there was some flirting going on - he had a thing going with a woman he met on a plantation when he was 20 and then met again many years later during the war. Actually that was part of the reason he got kicked out of his army unit - they were caught in tender moment and then his wife caught them in a tender moment and all hell almost broke loose in a 1800s sort of way, but it got straightened out.

Overall it's a good book - won the Pulitzer Prize - and I liked it that the author used words and sentence constructions from that period without getting too tedious about it. Like most historical novels, the story takes a bunch of anecdotes from that era and ties them together with a plot line, and people who never met in real life are closely acquainted for the sake of the telling.