Rodham

"Alternate histories, to put it mildly, have had a lot of mental appeal of late. But the genre can be difficult to pull off, and even more difficult to build an engaging plot around once you arrive at the initial “WHAT IF…” premise. With Rodham, a novel based around the premise that Hillary Clinton never becomes Hillary Clinton, and instead dumps Bill after law school and doesn’t marry him and move to Arkansas, Curtis Sittenfeld pulls it off. Her novel is an engaging read that at times perfectly parallels recent political history, and at other times veers off in a wild and surprising direction. (Her most interesting plot points do both at once.) I tore through this novel in a matter of days. In addition to everything else, it made me rethink some of my assumptions about how much that happened in 2016 and since had to do with the individual people on the political stage, and how much was instead tied to sentiments that are baked into American public opinion."

"My friend Curtis Sittenfeld's book "Rodham" is fan fiction in the best way... it gives us a world where Hillary Rodham never becomes Hillary Rodham Clinton."