March

It's not just this month in which we are currently dwelling, it's also the name of a really good book that I just finished reading. 

Did you ever read Little Women by Louisa May Alcott? Remember how their father was away being a chaplain in the Civil War and Marmee had to rush off to tend to him when he was injured, and then rush back when Beth got ill?  This book is his story. It's fascinating reading and such a clever idea on the part of the author, Geraldine Brooks, to take a shadowy minor character from another story and build him into a leading man by telling us his tale with careful snippets from Alcott's story woven in to bind the two stories together.

But don't be fooled, this is no children's story.  It's a tale of struggle - that of the North against the South, those in favour of abolition vs. those opposed to it, the challenges faced by those who go to war and those they leave behind, the war that goes on inside each of us to determine what is right and what is wrong and to what we are willing to go to defend our lives and our principles.

Ms. Brooks actually won the Pulitzer Prize for this book in 2006, so clearly I am not the only one who thought this was a book worth reading!