George Saunders’ Lincoln in the Bardo is a well-received, Man Booker Prize winning novel about the death of Abraham Lincoln’s beloved eleven-year-old son, Willie, and how Willie ends up in the bardo between life and death. It sounds like an interesting read, but I wish I had taken a moment to flip through the pages before buying this book because I do not like how it was written.

Lincoln in the Bardo alternates between the bardo, which is inhabited by people who do not know they are dead, and the events leading up to and following Willie’s death as recounted by bystanders in actual historical record. The inclusion of snippets of historical record lends some poignancy to the young boy’s death and its profound effect on Lincoln, who visited the crypt housing Willie’s coffin several times in private to grieve for his son, but I found it too disjointed to be exceptionally touching.

The scenes in the bardo are written kind of like a play, minus the stage directions, which is unfortunate because I found myself skimming very quickly over the pages, so I could not fully get into the strange dreaminess of the bardo. The people in the bardo are basically just hanging out and recounting their lives to each other, expecting to wake up and find themselves living again instead of moving on to the next realm of existence. For me, Lincoln in the Bardo would have been a great story about the transitory nature of life and love if only I could have gotten past its narrative structure, but I guess this novel is for more adventurous readers.