A few years back, on a visit to Washington, D.C., I took my eight-year-old son to Ford's Theater and the boardinghouse where Lincoln was carried after he was shot. Or maybe it was Mary herself who found me. From the author, I like to say that Mary's story found me. She lives in Northern California, where she teaches writing classes at the renowned independent bookstore Book Passage. Her travel writing has appeared in publications such as the Los Angeles Times, Salon, the San Francisco Chronicle, and the Dallas Morning News. About the author: Janis Cooke Newman is the author of the memoir The Russian Word for Snow, published in the United States, Germany, and Australia.

A dramatic tale filled with passion and depression, poverty and ridicule, infidelity and redemption, this is the unforgettable story of Mary Todd Lincoln. It is here where we meet her friends, the anorectic Minnie Judd, who is starving herself to win the affection of her beautiful husband and Myra Bradwell, the suffragist lawyer who helps Mary win her freedom.

Interwoven with her memories of the past, she describes life in the asylum, where the treatment for lunacy is bland food, cold baths, and near-lethal doses of chloral hydrate.

She was also a political strategist, a comfort to wounded soldiers, a supporter of emancipation, the first to be called First Lady, and a wife and mother who survived the loss of three children and the assassination of her beloved husband. Intelligent and unconventional-and, some thought, mad-she held spiritualist seances in the White House, ran her family into debt with compulsive shopping, negotiated with conniving politicians, and raised her young sons in the nation's capital during the bloodiest war this country has ever known. From her tempestuous childhood in a slaveholding Southern family through the opium-clouded years after her husband's death, we are let into the inner, intimate world of this brave and fascinating woman. Writing from Bellevue asylum-where the shrieks of the other inmates keep her awake at night-a famous widow can finally share the story of her life in her own words. An engrossing novel about Mary Todd Lincoln-one of history's most misunderstood and enigmatic women.

Mary by Janis Cooke Newman