Rodham

We’re all products of particular circumstances, of times and places and ways of thinking, but our minds and hearts can be opened. I loved the first chapter. The rest of the book went downhill. When I read the blurb for the first time, I got excited about Rodham. Having read the book, it was an awkward piece of fanfiction about living people. And I HATE fanfictions about real people, that’s a line you shouldn’t cross. I usually do not mind sex scenes, but reading them about a real life politician… it just made me feel incredibly uncomfortable. And then the chapters about the 2016 election… Hillary asking Trump to run for president, Trump endorsing her.. it just rubbed me the wrong way. I know it is a fictional book but it just felt wrong because it implied that Bill Clinton is a worse person than Trump. The book was quite dull and Hillary was a one-dimensional character. While I see Hillary Clinton as a famous feminist, this book wasn’t the feminist story I expected it to be.

I absolutely loved this. This book fictionalizes Hillary Clinton‘s life had she not married Bill Clinton. The premise is extremely intriguing and the realization in this novel done brilliantly. We follow Hillary from her early years as a college student at Wellesley, to Yale Law School, where she still meets and falls in love with Bill, to Arkansas with him, and back to Chicago and finally Washington. We span >40 years with her. The story is not told chronologically. We switch e.g. back and forth between 2015 and 1992. There is so much in this book that spoke to me and catered to my interests: universities in the US and their orbit, life in politics, public administration and law-related topics, what it is like to be a woman in politics/law/the public eye. We also get both a beautiful and devastating love story. I did a lot of googling and fact checking whilst reading - I liked this because I learned a lot about the Clinton’s even though I was reading a novel. Honestly, factual or historical fiction is one of my favorite genres. A lot in the book is facts, up to a certain point where fictional Hillary’s life diverges from real-Hillary (after the proposal she declined in the novel) and then we have the glorious alternative universe that we get to see unravel in the novel: Think Bill Clinton as a Silicon Valley billionaire in sex orgies, Trump endorsing Hillary - most importantly Hillary on HER path from the get go, a trailblazer for women and a very different 2016 presidential election outcome. I can’t say I am an admirer or fan of the real Hillary but that also doesn’t matter when reading this book because the Hillary in the book is a fictional character. It is a novel after all. Sittenfeld‘s Hillary is - and this was refreshing - not perfect. She is an idealist but she is also an opportunist. She is a feminist but she is a white feminist failing black women. She is altruistic but also has an ego. The writing was great. Hillarys‘s voice (the book is written in the first person singular) that Sittenfeld constructed worked well for me. The book was sometimes a page-turner, sometimes many pages were filled with mundane yet beautiful details and observations of life and humans. I thoroughly enjoyed reading it. Definitely also a Literat bookclub worthy book. My edition includes book club questions at the end as well as an interview with the author. Really enjoyed that as well. Thanks again to my GR friend Ron who reviewed this book and whose quote from his Washington Post Review is also featured on the book’s cover!! Your reviews make me find so many interesting and unique books.