The Lincoln Memorial Shrine

The Lincoln Memorial Shrine is a museum and research facility dedicated to Abraham Lincoln and the Civil War. Anyone interested in learning more about America's greatest president and most sanguinary war will be fascinated by the west coast's only institution dedicated to Abraham Lincoln.

Acclaimed local author and teacher Gayle Brandeis will read excerpts and discuss her newest young adult book entitled My Life with the Lincolns at the Lincoln Memorial Shrine in Redlands on July 31, 2010 at 1:00 p.m.  In My Life with the Lincolns, Brandeis introduces the reader to Mina Edelman, a precocious girl who faces, along with saving her family, the puzzling experience of growing up. My Life with the Lincolns centers around Edelman’s belief that she and her family are the Lincolns reincarnated. Her main task for the next three months: to protect her father from assassination, her mother from insanity, and herself—Willie Lincoln incarnate—from death at age twelve. Apart from that, the summer of 1966 should be like any other.

But Mina’s dad begins taking Mina along to hear speeches by Martin Luther King Jr. in Chicago. And soon he brings the freedom movement to their own small town, with consequences for everyone. The novel has won glowing reviews. Noted author of Crazy Beautiful, Lauren Baratz-Logsted described the book as “a winner,” while Julianna Baggott of The Ever Breath and The Prince of Fenway Park fame claims “readers will naturally draw correlations to present-day America -- essential ones.”  Brandeis completed some of her research for the book at the Lincoln Memorial Shrine.  At the conclusion of the free event, which is open to the public, copies of My Life with the Lincolns will be available for sale and inscription by the author, with 40% of the proceeds going to benefit the Lincoln Memorial Shrine.