(2009) American Wife. By Curtis Sittenfeld. (ISBN: 0812975405 / 0-8129-7540-5)

Book Description: Random House Publishing Group, 2009. First Edition Thus Paperback. Number line on copyright page states: 2 4 6 8 9 7 5 3 1. This is a remainder book which is new and never used. Book has red felt pen remainder mark on the bottom edge of the pages. 568 pages, 5.25" x 8" tall, 1.25" thick. New copy - Never read - Not price clipped. Beautiful copy of soft cover book. COLLECTOR'S COPY.

Book Condition: Brand New. Price on back cover reads $15.00 US.

Dust Jacket Condition: No DJ, this is a soft cover book.

Synopsis: A kind, bookish only child born in the 1940s, Alice Lindgren has no idea that she will one day end up in the White House, married to the president. In her small Wisconsin hometown, she learns the virtues of politeness, but a tragic accident when she is seventeen shatters her identity and changes the trajectory of her life. More than a decade later, when the charismatic son of a powerful Republican family sweeps her off her feet, she is surprised to find herself admitted into a world of privilege. And when her husband unexpectedly becomes governor and then president, she discovers that she is married to a man she both loves and fundamentally disagrees with–and that her private beliefs increasingly run against her public persona. As her husband’s presidency enters its second term, Alice must confront contradictions years in the making and face questions nearly impossible to answer.

Reviews:

Ms. Sittenfeld was not out to sensationalize but to sympathize. -Maureen Dowd, "The New York Times"

"Brilliant. A triumph. Curtis Sittenfeld has provided a plausible secret history of an American embarrassment - and a grand entertainment.-Joe Klein," Time Magazine"

A smart and sophisticated portrait of a high-profile political wife. Sittenfeld has an astonishing gift for creating characters that take up residence in reader's heads.-Connie Schultz, "Washington Post Book World"

Sittenfeld boldly imagines the inner life of a first lady. An intimate and daring story. American Wife is a vicarious experience, an up-close portrait of the interior life of a very complicated woman.cinematic. -USA Today

The novel, Sittenfeld's most fully realized yet, artfully evokes the painful reverberations of the past. "-New Yorker"

Compelling, enormously sympathetic. Sittenfeld's remarkable gifts as a storyteller draw you back into the fictional world of Alice Blackwell. She writes in the sharp, realistic tradition of Philip Roth and Richard Ford-clear, unpretentious prose; metaphors so spot-on you barely notice them. Sittenfeld may have lifted the set pieces from a real woman's life, but in the process she has created a wise and insightful character who is entirely her own. "-Time Out New York"

Ambitious. Sittenfeld installs herself deep within the psyche of the tight-lipped wife of the president and emerges with an evenhanded, compassionate look at her mind and heart.powerfully intimate. Grade: A. "-WashingtonPost"

A masterful highbrow-lowbrow mash-up that satisfies as ass-kicking literary fiction and juicy gossip simultaneously. "-Radar"

With "American Wife," Curtis Sittenfeld has deftly crossed an extraordinarily high wire.I read "American Wife" in just two or three delicious sittings, struck by the granular clarity of the author's descriptions and the down-to-earth believability of the story, bewitched by the charming, frustrating woman at the center of it: Laura Bush. "-- Ana Marie Cox, "The New York Observer"

"Curtis Sittenfeld is one of our best contemporary chroniclers of class and caste. Sittenfeld imagines this couple so deliciously and so plausibly. Curtis Sittenfeld invents a deep, messy, sympathetic life for a public person whose surface is all we'll ever know. "-- St Petersburg Times"

"Immensely readable. It's a nuanced portrait of a woman in a singularly fascinating position. "-- Cleveland Plain Dealer"

About The Author: Elizabeth Curtis Sittenfeld (born 1975) is an American writer. She is author of three novels: Prep, the tale of a Massachusetts prep school, The Man of My Dreams, a coming-of-age novel and an examination of romantic love, and American Wife, a fictional story loosely based on the life of First Lady Laura Bush, as well as a number of short stories.

Background and education: Sittenfeld was born August 23, 1975 in Cincinnati, Ohio, the second of four children (three girls and a boy) of Paul G. Sittenfeld, an investment adviser, and Elizabeth (Curtis) Sittenfeld, an art history teacher and librarian at Seven Hills School, a private school in Cincinnati.

She attended Seven Hills School through the eighth grade, then attended high school at Groton School, a boarding school in Groton, Massachusetts, graduating in 1993. In 1992, the summer before her senior year, she won Seventeen magazine's fiction contest.

She attended Vassar College in Poughkeepsie, New York before transferring to Stanford University in Palo Alto, California. At Stanford, she studied Creative Writing, wrote articles for the college newspaper, and edited that paper's weekly arts magazine. At the time, she was also chosen as one of Glamour magazine's College Women of the Year. She earned an MFA from the Iowa Writers' Workshop at the University of Iowa.

Prep: Her first novel, Prep, which took her three years to write, concerns a girl, Lee Fiora, from South Bend, Indiana, who goes to Ault School, an elite boarding school near Boston, Massachusetts. Some think Ault is a thinly veiled Groton School, but others say it's based on the two years Sittenfeld spent teaching at St. Albans School in DC. The plot deals with coming of age, self identity, and class distinctions in the preppy and competitive atmosphere.

Reviews of Prep were mixed, with views ranging from highly laudatory to those who said that it was a well-written but weakly plotted story that was buoyed by strong detail and narration. Some saluted the book for its verisimilitude, including Elissa Schappell, who wrote in The New York Times Review of Books: "Sittenfeld's dialogue is so convincing that one wonders if she didn't wear a wire under her hockey kilt." The New York Times named Prep one of their top five works of fiction for 2005.

Less positively, a review in Publishers Weekly stated, "The book meanders on its way, light on plot, but saturated with heartbreaking humor and written in clean prose. Sittenfeld . . . proves herself a natural in this poignant, truthful book." Critics have also questioned how much of the story is pure memoir instead of fiction.

The book has been optioned by Paramount Pictures, which also has an unrelated project with the same name, under its MTV Films umbrella.

The Man of My Dreams: Sittenfeld's second novel, called The Man of My Dreams, was published in May 2006 by Random House. It follows a girl named Hannah from the end of her 8th grade year through her college years at Tufts and into her late twenties. Both in comparison to Prep and other novels, The Man of My Dreams has gathered mixed reviews with much of the same praise and criticism Prep has garnered.

American Wife: Sittenfeld's third novel, called American Wife (2008), is the tale of Alice Blackwell, a fictional character who shares many similarities with former First Lady Laura Bush. In the novel, Blackwell is an only child who grows up in a Democratic family. As a high school student, Blackwell kills a friend in an auto accident. She also has an illegal abortion and discovers that her grandmother is a secret lesbian. She meets, falls in love with, and marries the wild son of an elite Republican family. Her husband rises in politics to the office of president, and, although Blackwell staunchly disagrees with her husband's politics, she continues to love him.