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Oct 13, 2020
There are spoilers below. The only reason I finished this book was so that I could write about how bad it is in good conscience. Let me disclose upfront: I am not a fan of Hillary Clinton. She is not a liberal, she's not a feminist. But I wanted to be persuaded, and I was excited to get an alternative perspective on what the political career of this smart, strong woman might have been like if she hadn’t been First Lady first. Would her relationship with Bill Clinton have pulled her into corruption anyway? Would she still be just as corrupt all on her own? Or not at all? Would her world-view have been different? How would she have handled 9/11? How about the "3 am phone call" attack ads? What about the fact that before there was Obamacare there was Hillarycare? Don't imagine any of that here. Sittenfeld doesn't. The only historic event addressed is Clarence Thomas' confirmation hearing, which Hillary watches from her office, and serves merely as a backdrop for a budding romance. There is no hacking of her email server, no term as Secretary of State, no real explanation as to why she chose not to run as Senator in NY. Her primary with Bernie Sanders isn’t even mentioned. The biggest omission, however, is a Boomer sentiment. If Hillary is a feminist at all, here, she is a millennial one. And that only goes to show that the author has little to no first-hand experience even with members of Hillary's generation, let alone the history she's writing about. And in fact, the cover image has more depth of character than Hillary Rodham on the written page. At first, I wasn't sure whether this was the result of the author's lack of skill in character development or genius at portraying the character as she really is. Ultimately, I landed on the former, despite the fact that the voice is so spot-on that I could only imagine Hillary narrating the book as a speech at a podium or an interview on Oprah's couch. That in itself is a flaw, as everything is told and nothing is shown. Every other character in the book serves only to reinforce how wonderful and perfect Hillary is, how she's made all the right and appropriate decisions, how she has few if any personal flaws. I don't understand the reviews that describe the book as a "powerful tour-de-force....singular and unforgettable" because this book is none of these things. What we get instead is Hillary as she is now, set in an alternate timeline where nothing different of any real consequence happens.