If You Only Read One: May 2020
We know that we read — and review — a lot of books. It definitely helps that there are three of us, in that regard. So with this feature, we want to tell you our favorite read of the month - if we only recommend one book to pick up, what would it be?
Shannon
I highly recommend “Rodham” by Curtis Sittenfeld. My boyfriend dubbed this one “Hillary Clinton fanfic,” and, while he’s not wrong, the book tackled several issues which I found super thought-provoking. Sittenfeld writes in Hillary’s voice, but, after our protagonist follows her boyfriend Bill Clinton to Arkansas, she eventually breaks up with him instead of marrying him. What follows are vignettes of Hillary’s career as a law professor rather than First Lady, although she does eventually enter into politics. There are some deep subjects covered here—Hillary encounters Carol Mosley Braun (the IRL first female Black U.S. Senator), and she makes several compromises in order to reach her political goals (something the IRL Hillary has done). But the central thesis to me was about women’s ambition and likability, and the compromises we make to succeed.
Moira
This month, I recommend Rufi Thorpe’s The Knockout Queen (my review here). This entirely original novel explores the unlikely friendship of two high school misfits, a closeted teen meeting men off the internet at night and a 6 foot 3 female volleyball star, who irrevocably change each other’s life path. A really beautiful and inventive plot, with one of my favorite epilogues of all time.
Elizabeth
I was going to post “Rodham” but Shannon beat me to it, so I guess I’ll have to go with my second favorite book this month: “The Jane Austen Society” by Natalie Jenner. I will eventually get around to a full review — I’ve done a lot of reading lately! good for me, bad for my review schedule — but I’d recommend this book for anyone that enjoys historical fiction, literary fiction, or Jane Austen. “The Jane Austen Society” is about a band of book-loving misfits who come together to commemorate Jane’s legacy immediately following World War II. Like many of Jane’s novels, this one is more of a character study than a plot-heavy novel, and when I finished, I commented to a friend that it was like reading a hug.
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