The President's Lady

Now, I know that I said I was reading The Book Thief, and I totally plan on reading it, but my mom-in-law randomly lent me this book and it happened to be the only book I had on me when my husband decided to pan for gold up American Fork. So I read this book over Labor Day instead.

I went into this book knowing absolutely nothing about President Jackson. Like, did you know that he actually killed a man in a duel over something the man had said about his wife, Rachel? And that him killing a man wasn't what made him lose the presidency the first time he ran?


So the story: Rachel is in a crappy marriage but is stuck because it's illegal for a woman to ask for a divorce and even if it hadn't been it was literally unheard of for people to even get divorces and even then they had to be due to something really bad like adultery. So Rachel is stuck in this marriage and then she meets Andrew Jackson, who pretty breathes awesomeness. So then she does get divorced but only because she admits (falsley) to being and adultress. Crazy, I tell you. So the book is basically the story of their marriage and his rise to the presidency and the effects her first marriage has on said rise. Some of the passages got flowerly and mushy so I skipped over them (try reading just the adjectives, you still get the gist without the gag), but I liked the book as a whole.

The ending will bring you to tears. If you don't know anything about him already, don't google it. Not knowing anything about him made the book even better. I did google Andrew Jackson after and according to the summary on Wikipedia the book is very accurate.

If you are interested, it's an old book and hard to find. My mom-in-law told me to keep it so if any of you want to borrow it. It only took me about 3 days to read (about 2 hours reading time a day).