Hestia Strikes a Match

I want to believe that this is a brilliant book and I am just not in a place to receive its brilliance. A...dating story (?) set in a US mid-second-civil-war. It feels like it was meant to be a commentary on how second-nature terrible things are nowadays that the main character perspective couldn't even focus on the war at hand and instead was recounting her dating escapades. I want to believe that it was intentional, but I'm not sure it was done artfully enough to get it all the way there.

I stopped at about 90% done because I felt I had better things to do and it didn't feel like it was ever going to nail the point home.

A dark comedy that came along at a time when I really needed one.
The combo of Hestia's dating life up against the backdrop of the Second Civil War and all of the characters at the nursing home- I was in love and could not turn the pages fast enough.

Can you successfully combine a Chick Lit book of dating snafus with a dystopian novel set during the second American Civil War? Christine Grillo's debut novel attempts this challenging feat, and for the most part it succeeds.

It's summer, 2023. Elderly president #46 has died, and the Black/Asian-American VP has succeeded him. This enraged 12 Southern states so much that they have seceded and formed a new Confederacy. The danger of violence is everywhere; there's even a new Safe Zones app that suggests the locations least likely to be bombed/shot up/burned down by traitors (Grillo isn't very subtle about her political beliefs). Dating apps now screen out confederates.

Our heroine is Hestia Harris, age 40-something, whose husband left her to join a pro-Union paramilitary group, and whose parents' yard sign reads “Make Liberals Feel Sad.” She works at a Baltimore retirement village, where her best friend is 84 year old resident Mildred. With a jaded view of love, Hestia hits the dating apps to find someone she won't fall too hard for. She dates a motley assortment of men, including an Italian member of the UN Peacekeeping Force, a puppeteer/mime, and her high school boyfriend. Some are better than others, but none come close to sweeping Hestia away, which is her secret fantasy.

The book's first few chapters are its weakest. The Chick Lit stuff is foregrounded, and the Civil War is mostly wallpaper. Hestia's dating adventures feels banal with all of the tragic violence and political upheaval going on around her. But as the novel progresses, the personal and the political become more closely entwined in Hestia's life, at a terrible cost. In contrast, her oral history interviews with the retirement village's residents demonstrate the resiliency of seniors who have seen it all, and for the most part have no fucks left to give.

Although the book seems like an awkward juxtaposition of genres at first, it won me over by the end, even with the chilling fact that Grillo's dystopia could easily become our “new normal” any day now. There can't really be a HEA ending when the country is at war with itself, but there is hope that people can still find meaningful connections in the midst of utter chaos.

Hestia Strikes a Match may be too much for people who need their reading to be an escape from the real world, but it will stick with me for a long time.