Comment

Sep 12, 2017MiRiAm12345 rated this title 4 out of 5 stars
I listened to this book on CD and really enjoyed it...until the very last chapter. I understand that this work of fiction was based on or loosely based on the life of Laura Bush. Alice Lindgren is the protagonist who is Sittenfeld's Laura stand in. The author establishes that Alice is an intelligent, thoughtful, modest and worldly lady who married beneath herself (this final phrase actually the words of her mother-in-law, the "Barbara Bush" character). Charlie Blackwell is the George W Bush character. He is portrayed as irresponsible, ambitious, fun, appealing and essentially shallow and wrongheaded. Their marriage is loving and dynamic. At lot of time is spent dealing with Alice's teen years and the earlier years of their marriage. No explanation is given how Charlie goes from being a baseball executive to President of the USA. This was an odd omission and left a hole in the flow of the story. In the last section of the book the focus is on one fateful day during Charlie’s presidency where the author makes no bones about her emphasis on Alice’s humanity over Charlie's "foolish"' polices. (SPOILER ALERT-)Final emphasis in the book is on Alice sharing with the reader that she never voted for her husband, thinking his opponent to be the better and more experienced candidate. So by creating a "fictional" account of the marriage of Laura and George W., Sittenfeld is freely able to drive home her political agenda quite insidiously and emphatically. I wonder what Laura Bush thought about this novel.