This month’s selection is an uncannily astute and timely offering of fan fiction for anyone who has ever wished that American politics might have taken a different turn. From the bard of reimagining things (she wrote Eligible, a modern retelling of Pride and Prejudice, and American Wife, a fictional memoir modeled conspicuously on Laura Bush) comes the long-awaited new novel by Curtis Sittenfeld.
Rodham is a counterfactual story that asks the question: what if Hillary had never married Bill? What if Hillary’s professional life had been her own to navigate? How might Hillary have shaped events and been shaped by them? The answers to these questions are offered in this delicious cocktail of fact and fiction, a wholly compelling, brilliantly incisive and extremely hard to put down novel.
Without giving too much away (the devil truly is in the detail in this book), as well as political anthropology, the novel interrogates female ambition, loneliness, unjust compromises, moral ambivalence, femininity and, well, orgies! Something for everyone.
It was equal amounts joyful and cathartic to dwell in this alternate reality!
A few links if you want to go deeper...
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