![]() ![]() He notes the sky’s swirling colors that convey a happy profusion (3), and then makes known his spousal longing (4). Despite the suffering around him, he attempts to assure Marmee that he is well. Brooks has taken a chance in evoking it so strongly at the end, but the chance pays off beautifully. March composes a letter to his wife, Marmee. That story of scorched gowns, amateur theatricals, pickled limes, balls and picnics and pianos provides a wonderfully effected, unstated but understood contrast to this story of the war. The Alcott book and characters have floated like ghosts all through March. For this part of the story, Brooks switches to Marmee's point of view, a move that brings us suddenly and nicely back to the world of Little Women. Among the characters in Brooks's book are the historical (Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, John Brown), the quasi-historical (the Marches), and the fully fictional (Grace Clement, a slave March knew as a young man and meets again during the war) … The final episode takes place in a Union hospital in Washington, D.C. Geraldine Brooks continues this fruitful confusion. When Alcott wrote Little Women, she created a confusion between the real Alcotts and the fictional Marches. ![]()
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