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Book Review of My Name Is Mary Sutter

My Name Is Mary Sutter
reviewed on + 8 more book reviews
Helpful Score: 2


I was sorely disappointed by this book. Perhaps I should have been warned by the title, which sounds more like a book for young people. I'm not a raging intellectual, but am no longer an adolescent. This book is aimed at the reading level of someone just going into "adult" books. That's my first complaint.

My second is that it takes forever to get to the civil war, which is the most interesting part to me and why I bought the book (in an airport.) The beginning chapters set the stage, I guess so you'll know Mary Sutter better, but it takes up too much of the book. Besides, she is a stock post-feminist character that exists in so many post-feminist novels, with few distinguishing characteristics.

All passages involving Abraham Lincoln should have been eliminated. The imagined conversations are forced. You want to know how he feels? Go read the 10,000 books written about how he felt, or go see the movie "Lincoln." I just skimmed those passages and was annoyed

On the bright side, her descriptions of the battlefield medical conditions, when they finally arrived, were wonderful. If only the book had stuck more to that and not become an adolescent girls soap opera it could have been good.

Did I mention that her writing is very awkward? Some sentences are so convoluted you have to read them two or three times for them to make any sense.