"I wish I had a little girl like you, Julie," Mary Todd Lincoln often told Julie Taft, and for the first year of the Lincoln presidency, sixteen year old Julie had the run of the White House, befriending the First Lady, playing with the Lincoln boys, and sharing priceless moments with Lincoln himself, which she noted down in her diary. An intimate portrait of the Lincoln family, as only a child could see them, through the first, fateful, tragic year of the civil war. non-fiction.