Lincoln in the Bardo

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Call Number: Adult Book / Large Print / Fiction / Historical / Saunders, George
On Shelf At: Malletts Creek Branch, Westgate Branch

Location & Checkout Length	Call Number	Checkout Length	Item Status
Malletts Adult Books 4-week checkout	Adult Book / Large Print / Fiction / Historical / Saunders, George	4-week checkout	On Shelf
Westgate Adult Books 4-week checkout	Adult Book / Large Print / Fiction / Historical / Saunders, George	4-week checkout	On Shelf

"February 1862. The Civil War is less than one year old. The fighting has begun in earnest, and the nation has begun to realize it is in for a long, bloody struggle. Meanwhile, President Lincoln's beloved eleven-year-old son, Willie, lies upstairs in the White House, gravely ill. In a matter of days, despite predictions of a recovery, Willie dies and is laid to rest in a Georgetown cemetery. "My poor boy, he was too good for this earth," the president says at the time. "God has called him home." Newspapers report that a grief-stricken Lincoln returns, alone, to the crypt several times to hold his boy's body. From that seed of historical truth, George Saunders spins an unforgettable story of familial love and loss that breaks free of its realistic, historical framework into a supernatural realm both hilarious and terrifying. Willie Lincoln finds himself in a strange purgatory where ghosts mingle, gripe, commiserate, quarrel, and enact bizarre acts of penance. Within this transitional statecalled, in the Tibetan tradition, the bardoa monumental struggle erupts over young Willie's soul."--Amazon.com.

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COMMUNITY REVIEWS

the great and not so great submitted by camelsamba on June 30, 2019, 10:19pm There were aspects of this I enjoyed, and aspects that I did not. I enjoyed the last half more than the first. I listened to the audiobook, which is read/performed by a giant cast (the credits were 5 or 6 minutes long!); I would like to flip through the print edition to see how the different characters and quotations are represented.

One mundane aspect: to hear the contemporaneous accounts of certain events that are described quite differently (e.g "the moon was full" yet also "there was no moon"), and to hear the quotes of people lambasting Lincoln for things that we now hold in high esteem. I mean I get it, the country was divided, political opposition will always take such a form, but wow - it was stark. Especially in the context of the main drama, Willie Lincoln's illness and death.

More profound: contemplating the nature of life, and death, and the afterlife - soul and spirit and the spark that makes someone who they are. As someone grieving a recent loss, certain chapters really spoke to me (I listened to chapters 74 and 92 many times).