State Champ
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- $24.99
Publisher Description
"A searing portrait of political & personal desperation," (Andrea Lawlor), Plum's State Champ is a protest novel for our times.
A Jezebel Book Club Pick
A high-school state champion runner turned college dropout, Angela is working as a receptionist at an abortion clinic when a "heartbeat law" criminalizes most abortions statewide. In the ensuing upheaval, her boss is arrested for providing illegal procedures and the clinic is shut down.
Angela has never been either an activist or a model employee. But she gets why her boss didn't follow the rules. She decides to go on a hunger strike in the boarded-up clinic, to protest her boss's arrest and everything that's been lost. She'll draw on her skillset: the masochistic discipline of a runner, a history of self-destructive behavior, and a willingness to sleep on exam room tables (whose hygienic paper she uses as her diary).
Angela's protest is solitary, enraged, and a little messy, but it mobilizes a group of people around her-an ex who's a local journalist looking for a good story, the everyday people the clinic once served, and most especially a formidable anti-abortion activist named Janine.
Lucid, strange, and deeply metal, State Champ cuts through the political rhetoric to explore the relationship between bodily autonomy and real freedom. Angela's story is about what abortion access means day-to-day and how much we are-in ways that can transform us-responsible for one another.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Plum (Strawberry Fields) delivers a mordant and morbid narrative of post–Roe v. Wade America, centered on a young woman who stages a hunger strike at a shuttered abortion clinic somewhere in the Midwest. After an abortion provider is sentenced to 12 years in prison for violating a new state law prohibiting abortions once a fetal heartbeat is detected, former receptionist Angela goes on a hunger strike in support of the doctor, known only as Dr. M. While sequestered alone in the clinic, Angela speaks often by phone with her ex-boyfriend John, a newspaper reporter, pushing him to break the story of her action. A colleague of John's ends up writing the piece, which the paper buries. Angela also seeks help in vain from her aunt, a city councilwoman, who chides her for trespassing and argues that Dr. M was legally prosecuted. As the weeks pass, Angela's condition grows dire. The distressing tale is buoyed by Angela's incisive narration and frank humor, such as her quip that the pro-life "whiners" who gather outside the clinic to oppose her campaign are "like a sorority had spent 20 years braiding each other's hair too tight while driving up the costs of each other's weddings." Readers won't want to put this down.
