American Wife

American Wife by Curtis Sittenfeld


My rating: 2 of 5 stars
Please note, I do not give two stars to the narrator. The narrator did a wonderful job, it was the book itself I didn't like.

Sittenfeld uses Laura Bush as the inspiration for the narrator of American Wife. The difficulty is, I don't know what's fact and what's not. If I wanted to read a memoir by Laura Bush or a biography about Laura Bush, that's what I would have picked up.

Throughout the novel I kept thinking to myself, "What's Sittenfeld's political objective with this?" There were times when I thought she was trying to use the main character, Alice, to justify Bush's character, and then others where even Alice doesn't understand why Bush's character does things. I just don't know.

The main character has a controversial medical procedure which I feel was too much of the book. I found myself thinking, just get to the end all ready.

If this book didn't use Laura and George Bush as inspiration, I think it could have been a pretty darn decent novel about a woman learning about herself while struggling with the realities of marriage. However, I couldn't tell fact from fiction and it frustrated the buggers out of me.

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