Hestia Strikes a Match
A Novel
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Hestia Strikes a Match
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Narrated by:
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Jeremy Carlisle Parker
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Sheree Wichard
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Tom Force
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By:
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Christine Grillo
About this listen
Long-listed, NPR Best Book of the Year, 2023
This program features multicast narration.
Christine Grillo's Hestia Strikes a Match is the slyly funny story of a woman looking for love and friendship in the midst of a new American civil war.
The year is 2023, and things are bad—bad, but still not as bad as they could be. Hestia Harris is forty-two, abandoned by her husband (he left to fight for the Union cause), and estranged from her parents (they’re leaving for the Confederacy). Yes, the United States has collapsed into a second civil war and again it’s Unionists against Confederates, children against parents, friends against friends.
Hestia has left journalism (too much war reporting) for a job at a Baltimore retirement village on the Inner Harbor (lots of security). She’s single and adrift, save for her coworkers and Mildred, an eighty-four-year-old, thrice-happily-married resident who gleefully supports Hestia’s half-hearted but hopeful attempts to find love again in a time of chaos and disunion. She reckons with the big questions (How do we live in the midst of political collapse? How do we love people who believe terrible things?) and the little ones (How do I decorate a nonworking fireplace? Can I hook up with a mime?), all while wrestling with that simmering, roiling, occasionally boiling feeling that things are decidedly not okay, but we have to keep going, one foot in front of the other, because maybe, just maybe, we can still find the kinds of relationships that sustain a person through anything.
Christine Grillo’s Hestia Strikes a Match is an irreverent, incisive, laugh-out-loud interrogation of modern love of all kinds, in all its messy beauty. Equal parts wise and hilarious, it fills the heart, fortifies the spirit, and will surely help to fend off despair. In the face of the everyday wildness of our times, it asks and answers that newly constant question: How do we make a full, wonderfully ordinary life when the whole mad world is clattering down around us?
A Macmillan Audio production from Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
©2023 Christine Grillo (P)2023 Macmillan AudioCritic Reviews
“[Christine Grillo’s] sharp, sparkling debut is a timely reminder of what connects people even in a country tearing itself apart: the desire to love.”—Allison Cho, Booklist
“[A] clever satire of life in a divided country . . . Bridget Jones’s Diary for the post-MAGA era.”—Publishers Weekly
“Extremely wise and deeply funny, this debut gives us a riotously irreverent, effortlessly firecracking pair of Socratic dialogues: one between generations debating how to find love or whether to seek it at all, and the other between citizens trying to figure out how to save their country.”—Carlene Bauer, author of Girls They Write Songs About