BookBrowse Reviews The General and Julia by Jon Clinch

Ulysses S. Grant is not one of the most famous U.S. presidents—especially compared with Abraham Lincoln, whose legacy Grant continued into the post–Civil War Reconstruction era. But novelist Jon Clinch has a habit of shining a spotlight on figures, historical or fictional, who have previously been overlooked. In The General and Julia, he depicts Grant as a kind, pensive man who won followers in wartime and peace, and whose love for his family outweighed declines in money and health.

Although Grant, the general of the title, is very much the focus of the novel, the narrative opens and closes with Julia. In 1843, Lieutenant Grant visits his old West Point roommate in Missouri, but his eye is caught by his friend's seventeen-year-old sister, Julia, whose pet canary has just died. Grant conducts a sincere Christian burial service for the bird. This first chapter is echoed ...