Battleground State

by Natasha Patel

For Lily DeMarco, change can't come soon enough. Laid off from her corporate law firm and living in her parents' basement in Paterson, New Jersey, for Lily, saying yes to a job on the Ramal Cady campaign is a chance to do something -- anything -- to shake up her stalled life. When she is assigned to rural Georgia, she points her Volvo south, and takes on the daunting challenge of trying to get the locals to vote for a black Presidential candidate in a region where the Civil Rights project is far from complete. Starting with a handful of volunteers in a shack on the wrong side of the tracks, Lily is eventually thrust into a leadership role. As the votes are cast, Lily realizes that she has never felt more alive than among fried pickles and SaveAlot, with a shotgun in the corner, within a community far away from anything she's ever known. And only when the race is nearly lost does she come to see what it would mean for her state to win. Battleground State is a funny, suspenseful, and deeply moving. Written by a former Obama campaign staffer, it is a loving tribute to every campaign whose outcome ever turned on the efforts of those on the ground.

222 pages, Paperback

First published January 7, 2013

Reviews

[FittenTrim · Rating 5 out of 5]

Really fun book about the highs and lows of being a cog in a machine: in this case, working a national election on a local county level. With the fictional candidate being a composite Obama with a Palin-lite running mate, there's real drama as to whether our rag tag group of volunteers can pull out an unlikely victory in a southern battleground state.