It has been a while since I read any Pulitzer winners. To get me motivated, I even started a Battle of the Prizes challenge on my Rose City Reader blog. Since then, I am two-thirds of the way through Advise and Consent, and just finished March.

The trouble with novels about the Civil War is that they are bound to follow a requisite formula, and Geraldine Brooks’s Pulitzer-winning March is no exception. All the familiar scenes, themes, and elements are there: lonely letters home, the smoke-filled chaos of battle, stealing a dead person’s boots, whipping a slave, selling a slave’s family members, a slave revolt, Southern gentility, Northern rough manners, soldiers trashing the plantation, buildings burning, having no food but root vegetables, and the mandatory amputation of limbs with hand tools.

Civil War novels only distinguish themselves with what gets used to string together these common essentials. Brooks differentiates her book by . . .

(See the full review on Rose City Reader.)