Summary
If you have loved a book in your youth, it's sometimes hard and even disappointing to read a sequel, or a contemporary novel based upon that book. There have been continuations of Jane Austen, riffs on "Rebecca," there is Jean Rhys' beautiful "Wide Sargasso Sea," which provides a backstory for "Jane Eyre." When the new novel in question takes off from a familiar place but creates its own world, this works. When it's a piece of writing as sustained as "Wide Sargasso Sea," it's like an answer to the original sent across time. Geraldine Brooks (who is Australian, lives in Virginia and has just won a Pulitzer) has written a novel that takes as its starting point the absence of the father, Mr. March, in Louisa M. Alcott's "Little Women." Using the diaries of Bronson Alcott, Louisa's father, and the obsession of her own husband, the writer Tony Horwitz, about the Civil War, Brooks has created a man who did not exist in Alcott's own book except as an idealized father.
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March: Geraldine Books
March
Geraldine BooksPenguin, $14If you have loved a book in your youth, it's sometimes hard and even disappointing to read a sequel, or a contemporary novel based upon that book. There have been continuations of Jane Austen, riffs on "Rebecc...See the full content of this document
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