Alice Lindgren is a sweet, bookish teenager who is only just imagining her first romance with a high school classmate when he is killed in a car crash which she has caused. That’s quite a tragedy to overcome, as you can imagine, and as a result Alice grows up to be a serious singleton, working at a primary school library, focussing on other people’s children and reading. She’s not exactly life and soul of the party material, but she is kind and good, if a tiny bit dull. Then she meets Charlie Blackwell at a neighbourhood barbecue and her life takes a different track.
Charlie definitely is life-and-soul material and couldn’t be dull if he tried. Not her cup of tea at all, obviously. Still, good-looking, charismatic guys like that do hold a certain charm even for squares like Alice, and her reluctance to be swayed by his boisterous enthusiasm only eggs him on in hot pursuit of her. And it works. Five minutes later this small town Democrat only-child finds herself married to the wealthy son of a sprawling Republican family. She loves Charlie, who is also kind and good in his way but, shoot, the man can drink! And she finds it hard to be rich herself when so much of the rest of the country is poor. If only Charlie would buckle down and get a real job. When he does, that job is President of the United States.
Curtis Sittenfeld has done a stellar job of fictionalising the life of Laura Bush, wife of George W., who indeed did have an accident that resulted in the death of a high-school friend, who was a librarian, who did meet George W. at a barbecue and swiftly married him. A lot of the in-between bits, the sex for example, are obviously made-up and this is definitely not a political book, but it is a page-turning portrait of what it might be like to be the other (better?) half of someone very powerful with whom you don’t necessarily agree.
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