MARCH by Geraldine Brooks

Finished Su 6/10/12......................One of the finest historical novels about the Civil War that I have ever read. It's chock full of interesting details and interesting footnotes of the period. The novel is actually an extrapolation of LITTLE WOMEN by Louisa May Alcott and posits about the role of the father. MHenry David Thoreau's family business as a pencil manufacturer, the racist members of the Union army who fought side by side with die-hard abolitionists

Based on the disappearance of Mr. March in LITTLE WOMEN. He's an army chaplain, and survivor of the battle of Ball's Bluff. He's writing to his wife, Marmee. He finds himself at an island home that is being used as a field hospital. Twenty years earlier he had visited this home as a peddler from Concord, MA. He had met a beautiful slave girl, Grace, and she is there at the hospital. As an eighteen year old, she gave him his first kiss, and years later she kind of convinces him that he has done the best that he can. He sets up a school for the poor black kids called Oak Landing. Rebels attack and he ends up in a Union hospital in Washington, DC. His wife travels to meet him. Grace is there with him when Marmee arrives, yet Grace convinces him that he is a father, first and foremost, and return to his wife and kids.