I adored this book for so many reasons. The writing style flowed incredibly well for me. I loved Alice's voice throughout the book, and I loved how carefully it was all written. It sounded like someone who'd had a lot of practice speaking in public and knew word choice was important. Normally that's something that would bug me in a book because I do like a casual feel, but it worked so well here because it sounded like the character.

My favorite kinds of books are usually character studies and that's a hundred percent what this was. You follow Alice throughout her life, spending a lengthy period of time on a couple of different sections with long gaps in between. I just like getting to know characters. It doesn't have to be big and dramatic, just their lives and personalities and perspectives. I thought that was so incredibly well done.

The things I didn't love so much boiled down to two main points. First of all, the ending. The ending felt kind of overdone to me. Most of the book is just Alice being Alice and living her life, and then the ending felt like all of a sudden we need a point to this book and some overarching meaning, which just didn't seem necessary to me. I kind of would have been okay if it had just ended with Alice continuing to live her life without some greater commentary. It also felt kind of rushed. Like halfway through writing it, Sittenfeld realized she was four hundred pages in and needed to condense the second half of the book into 150 pages. It felt like around that point the book started trying to wrap up which made the whole ending feel overlong to me.

The other thing that made me very uncomfortable was that this is based off Laura Bush. Sittenfeld has obviously taken a great number of liberties and she's not trying to pass this off as Bush's life or the truth or anything, but it's still undeniably Laura Bush. The whole time reading this book, especially as I got further in, I couldn't stop thinking about Laura Bush and her husband. As much as I tried to distance it in my head, I couldn't. I don't know how exactly to describe my discomfort with that. In a shallow sense, part of it was definitely the sex scenes. They weren't overly graphic and wouldn't have normally bothered me, but I promise you I didn't want to be thinking about George Bush's penis.

But it was more than just that. It feels kind of wrong to speculate on all the salacious details and personal thoughts of someone's life, including their sex life and abortion and personal flaws and private worries and just every detail of their lives. I can't imagine the discomfort I would feel if someone wrote a novel like this inspired by my life. I get that Laura Bush is a public figure so it is slightly different, but it just made me uncomfortable and I wished throughout the book that it was just pure fiction. Knowing the innermost feelings of fictional characters doesn't make me uncomfortable, but publicly speculating on real people/playing with what might have happened to them in a thinly veiled fiction format (like this President Blackwell was elected in 2000, they had to recount the votes in Florida and it went to the Supreme Court, then 9/11 happened and he invaded Iraq- you can't get much more thinly veiled than that; it lacked all subtlety) makes me cringe.

But when I can get past that discomfort, I loved this. It's exactly the kind of book I enjoyed reading and it was so compelling from beginning to end. I love how fully formed Alice was with all her strengths and all her flaws. I loved her voice and reading about her life. I loved seeing her messy marriage and personal relationships and I don't think there was a single time in this past week that I didn't want to pick up this book. I could've done with another few hundred pages, if I'm being honest. I just loved it.

If you like slow, character study-type novels, I'd highly recommend this. I definitely plan to pick up more from Sittenfeld. Hopefully find something with all her wonderful writing and maybe without the uncomfortably close to real life characters.