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** spoiler alert ** Just wrote this review:



I wanted to like this book more than I eventually did. I thought it started off very strong, the personal stories about Hillary, and because it was in the first person narrative, made it flow so easily and made you bond with her as the central character. I disliked Bill from the start, but it was very clever how they showed the intertwining of fact and fiction in the book.

I suppose there was no way the book wouldn’t become more political towards the latter half, but what I disliked what the portrayal to make Hillary look so� perfect and holier than thou, and some of the events made the ending hard to believe. Also that Sittenfeld didn’t give Hillary a family, or made her so obsessed with Bill later on in life or with a married friend - it was painful and cliched. For a feminist, I would have liked to see a less stereotypical portrait of an ambitious woman (I.e. not a single female).

They entirely skipped the part where she was Secretary of State, which was quite an important part in her political career and a time where she made a few mistakes. At some point it became hard to distinguish this as a fictitious piece of work because the recent facts of 2015-16 are still too fresh in everybody’s minds, at least in mine. I thought some incredibly good points were raised about the double standards in America for men and women leaders, and I couldn’t agree more with those points. Maybe because of that, the ending was not quite believable. Personally, America is way too conservative for a woman president I think. So maybe if Sittenfeld showed Clinton’s presidency followed by Lewinsky scandal and then Rodham presidency - that might have been more believable to me as a reader. I think it will only take some sort of a big shake up or scandal for Americans, who by and large still seem to believe in traditional gender roles (apart from the East and West Coast), to elect a female president.

Despite being fiction this book is also problematic on many levels - it entirely ignores racism issues, the problem of being lost in politically charged media bubbles. It paints Trump as a harmless bumbling business man with no political agenda (sorry, wasn’t that the issue in the first place? This underestimation of him??). Sorry to say even as a fiction work, this is dangerously Misleading