A Best Book of the Year at NPR
A Must-Read at The Washington Post, Oprah Daily, and The Orange County Register
"Steamy, smart, and hilarious." -Oprah Daily
"Effervescent . . . Acerbically funny and tender . . . [A] supremely layered, emotionally and intellectually resonant novel for our time." -Lauren LeBlanc, The Boston Globe
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?
Industry Reviews
"An extraordinary debut about an extraordinary time, Hestia Strikes a Match delighted me and made me laugh out loud and tear up at the same time. Christine Grillo combines wry satire with a moving story of how we form bonds of love and friendship even as the world around us is crumbling. Hestia is everything I could wish for in a character--quirky, smart, infuriating, broken, wise, and funny as hell--and I wish she were real so I could meet her for a drink and stay in her world a little longer."
--Angie Kim, author of Miracle Creek
"Hestia, our narrator through the frighteningly plausible near-future of this book, is astonishing. Intense. Funny. Smart. There are so many things to root for here. Will America win? Will Hestia find her match? Will the dear members of Hestia's community survive the violence all around them? There's a beautiful balance in this book between personal predicament and national catastrophe. I loved it. Hestia Strikes a Match is the novel I didn't know I needed."
--Jessica Francis Kane, author of Rules for Visiting
"Christine Grillo's extremely wise and deeply funny novel, Hestia Strikes a Match, gives us something much more necessary than yet another dystopian novel belatedly trying to wake us up to the always-already. She 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. One of the great pleasures of this novel is watching as Hestia, who feels muddled and stuck, comes into her own as an unshakable moral center."
--Carlene Bauer, author of Girls They Write Songs About
