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I wanted to reach this novel because I appreciated her book on the plague in England from the 1600s, ‘Year of Wonders��. So I thought a novel about the father of Little Women (Louisa May Alcott) would be interesting because I had read that classic about 2 years ago (at least Part 1, I don’t remember reading Part 2 [Good Wives]) and very much liked it. So, what happened to Mr. March?

Well, I went into this just knowing it had a character in it, Mr. March, that was a ‘side-bar�� part of Little Women, a book which I had liked. But my memory sucks, and I should have remembered this was about the Civil War (like, ‘duhhh Jim!��). Wow, talking about a Debbie Downer in reading this book. I read it in 2 days because I wanted to be through with it. The graphic descriptions of war and the dead and the wounded—she spared ABSOLUTELY NO DETAILS in the goriness of the war. In ‘Year of Wonders�� I made the comment that her graphic descriptions of certain things made me uncomfortable, but I also made the comment that I felt that nevertheless she was painting a realistic picture of something that actually happened. So, I appreciated the writing, goriness and all.

Here she continued where she left off in ‘Year of Wonders��. There she described what a swollen lymph node in the neck of a plague patient looked like, and what the pus looked like when the node burst. Super yuck. And in ‘March�� she describes the smell of pus! Yeeeeeeshhhhhhhhhhh!!!! 😬

I did not like one element in the novel that I guess she had felt that she must have in the book…a pseudo-romance between Mr. March and the slave Grace Clement.

I was surprised this won a Pulitzer Prize (2006). But then I am surprised by a lot of things. 😐

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