Lincoln in the Bardo is a beautiful novel by author George Saunders.
The long-awaited first novel of the author Ten Days Twelfth. An original and moving father-son story is none other than Abraham Lincoln, as well as an unforgettable cast of supporting characters, life and death, history and invention.
February 1862. Civil War less than a year. This nation has begun in earnest, and this nation has begun to realize that it is in the midst of a long and bloody struggle. President Lincoln’s beloved 11-year-old son, Willie, lay upstairs in the White House, seriously ill. Within days, despite predictions of resilience, Willie died and was laid to rest in Georgetown Cemetery.
Newspapers reported that the grieving Lincoln returned alone to the crypt several times to hold his son’s body. From the seed of that historical truth, George Saunders turned an unforgettable story of family love and loss out of its historical, realistic framework into a medium-sized supernatural realm. both funny and scary. Willie Lincoln finds himself in a strange purgatory, where ghosts mix, torment, pity, quarrel, and perform bizarre acts of penance. Traditionally known in Tibet as the bardo – an epic struggle broke out over the soul of the boy Willie.
This book. This book is not for everyone. That is a mystery. I went from loving it to being less attracted to it… I almost completely gave up on it about halfway through, but kept going and eventually found myself liking it back. Lincoln in the Bardo was introduced to me as a book that could teach/lead students to AP Literature and Creative Studies in high school, but a quarter of the way through, I KNOW this wasn’t it at all. books that I feel comfortable teaching. … Personally, I cannot delegate this task to a student, and below, I will tell you why.
Lincoln in the Bardo has many awards with claims of great literary merit; they say that a similar novel has never been written, and possibly so, but even so
