Hestia Strikes a Match

By Christine Grillo

Book Overview

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?

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0374609977
• ISBN13: 9780374609979
• Release Date: April 2023
• Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
• Length: 400 Pages
• Weight: 1.10 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.3" x 5.7" x 8.4"

Customer Reviews

Wonderful book!

I finished reading Hestia Strikes a Match and I loved it 😭 The book doesn't have a major plot point, but it is a chain of smaller sub-blots that push the story forward. Seeing the character growth for Hestia was amazing, because I was reading this book from a reader perspective, but also from a writer perspective. She navigates life trying to date as a woman in her 40s, seeing her best friend get sicker, and drawing boundaries with her family. All while society is on the verge of collapse. @christine.grillo managed to place complex characters in a challenging/w4r setting, and still portray them as human as possible. The characters reminded me what it's like to be just that, human, and that at the end of the day we seek a connection, the right place, and the right people for us.