The First First Gentleman

by Gerald Weaver

The First First Gentleman is an epic love story about the obstacles overcome by Melinda Sherman, a physically and emotionally wounded war hero who falls in love with a worldly political operative who manages her campaign for President of the United States. Their love is their greatest political asset. She speaks out in a stunning way that punctures the cultural orthodoxy and feeds the public’s hunger for a different political leader, while dark forces seek to undo her. This novel is a healing love story, a political thriller, a starkly honest social commentary, and an homage to Charles Dickens.

595 pages, Kindle Edition

Published August 1, 2016

About the author

Gerald Weaver received his bachelor's degree from Yale University and Juris Doctor degree from Catholic University. He has been a Capitol Hill chief of staff, a campaign manager, a lobbyist, a single father, a teacher of English and Latin, a collector and seller of Chinese antiquities and a contributor to the political magazine, George. He lives in the suburbs of Washington, DC, and travels regularly between the United Kingdom.


About Gerald Weaver

Gerald was born in Western Pennsylvania, where he grew up with three sisters and no brothers. Gerald spoke Sicilian dialect with his grandmother who was also his nanny until he was five. He has dual citizenship, Italy and the United States. Gerald attended Yale University and Catholic University School of Law. He has worked as a lawyer, a stay-at-home-parent, a lobbyist, a teacher of Latin and English, a campaign manager, a real estate developer, a Chief of Staff on Capitol Hill, and now purchases and sells Chinese antiquities. At Yale, he studied literature under Harold Bloom and fiction writing under Gordon Lish.

Gerald’s third novel, The Girl and the Sword is a captivating historical saga that will correct how we think about the role of women in history. Pauline, a formidable young woman facing religious persecution, takes the least likely path to save herself, and inadvertently shows us how a mature love can change the world. It is also a history we should already all know, of England’s first parliament and constitution, and how they were brought about . . . in the thirteenth century.

The First First Gentleman is mostly drawn from Gerald’s thirteen years in national politics and on Capitol Hill, and from a lifetime of observing national politics from a front row seat. Gerald still has many friends on Capitol Hill and in government, including a US Senator and a Presidential appointee. It is a factually accurate political thriller that punctures the cultural orthodoxy, and a love story that ends with a woman in the White House.

Gerald began to write his first novel Gospel Prism after a visit in 2010 with Marie Colvin, who was then foreign correspondent for the Sunday Times of London. Marie and Gerald had dated at university and for a few years after, and they remained lifelong friends. She told him in 2010 to: “Write the damn book.” In February of 2012 she carried the finished original manuscript to Syria on what turned out to be her last assignment. She had it in the small knapsack, which contained only survival items and which she carried through sewers and over barbed wire.

Gerald spends his time between Italy, the United Kingdom, and Bethesda, MD where he resides with his wife, Lily. He has two children, Simon and Harriet.

Reviews

[ProofProfessor · Rating 1 out of 5]

There are two major things wrong with this book. Firstly, and terribly, the book is awash with errors of grammar, spelling, punctuation and consistency:
: Tenses are incorrect: ‘I have not very impressed with you’ (example: p109)
: Words are omitted so that the text makes no sense: “I would like hear.” (p502)
: Words are wrongly repeated: ‘He had even once had guaranteed it.’ (p506)
: There are straightforward spelling mistakes: callibou (for ‘caribou’, p173)
: Singular and plural are mismatched: ‘the family who builds their fashionable home’ (p301)
: Apostrophes are wrong: ‘these boy’s innocent requests’ (p81)
: Homophones are incorrectly used: ‘principle’ and ‘principal’ (p461)
: Incorrectly spelled proper names and wrongly styled personal pronouns alone account for nearly 100 errors. How can an American-based author misspell or mis-style Walmart, McDonald’s, Navy SEALs, or Nashville’s Grand Ole Opry (p115)? Several US place names are also misspelled. Nixon’s famous 1952 Checkers speech is printed as ‘Chekers’ (p446).
: Two words are used where they should be one: ‘board rooms’ (p79) conveys rooms made out of board, not where business meetings take place. One reason why two words become one or are hyphenated is to avoid wrongly conveying, for example, that a ‘baby sitter’ (p272) is a sitter who is a baby, or that a ‘big wig’ (p280) is a wig that is large, rather than someone important. If in doubt, consulting a good dictionary always helps.
: Similarly, nouns modified by an adjective/adjectival phrase lack the correct hyphenation: a ‘same sex marriage’ (p543; passim) might be a marriage where the sex is the same, whereas we all know that a hyphen is required - ‘same-sex’ - to denote a marriage between two men or two women.
: Single lines of dialogue beginning with double speech marks end with none (p183), and there is other missing or incorrect punctuation around speech.
: Certain singular nouns ending in ‘s’ (and presumably believed, wrongly, to be plural) are wrongly made into a ‘singular’ - ‘inning’ (p158)
: Incorrect initialisation of proper nouns also means that ‘the right Reverend Seymour Barton’ (p199) implies that the man is less respected than perceived to be correct - a Reverend who is right - and that Jesus is in ‘heaven’.
: One character is called ‘Wilton Carlson’, ‘Wilton Carlton’, ‘Wilton Carslon’ and ‘Congressman Wilton’. Another character is randomly both ‘Elliot’ and ‘Elliott’ passim - in one instance (p546) only two words apart.
: The author seems unaware of the true origin of the phrase ‘Stockholm Syndrome’ (p143).

The above list accounts for well over 320 errors. It is shocking.

The author, the credited copy-editor (Jemima Hunt) and the elsewhere credited “Editorial Services” (whitefox) were contacted before this review was posted, but none of them responded.
The second thing wrong with this book is that it is not, as implied by the title and by general advertising, about someone being the first First Gentleman. It is not about how that husband would act, behave or think, simply because 98% of the action of this overlong ands misleadingly titled book (569 pages; c.220,000 words) is taken up with the years *before* Melinda Sherman becomes President, and *before* Garth Teller becomes the first First Gentleman. She is confirmed as President as late as page 558.
This editorially amateurish and shoddy product is the worst type of printed self-published book we have come across in nearly four years of trading.
The excellent printing and binding were by Lightning Source UK, and we liked the cover: colourful, smart, shiny, and without typos. Just don’t judge the book by it. A list of corrections is available on request.

[Roger DeBlanck · Rating 5 out of 5]

Gerald Weaver’s second novel The First First Gentleman is much more than a memorable love story, and to call it epic is an understatement. In its tremendous sweep and breadth, it muses on history, government, politics, religion, geology, mythology, and baseball to name merely a few. This corpus of knowledge weaves its way seamlessly into a grand narrative that chronicles the full lives of the story’s two central figures, Melinda Sherman and Garth Teller, along with their families and close friends.

Coming from Jewish heritage and having grown up in Texas, Garth’s life is examined from his undergrad years, which include dabbling in the underworld of drug deals. The narrative takes him from his time in law school at Yale and eventually to his immersion in politics on Capitol Hill and then to running successful campaigns. Melinda grows up in the quaint town of London, Kentucky and endures a challenging childhood at home alongside her brother, Porter. In her youth, she demonstrates wisdom and strength beyond her years while at the same time assuming a motherly role in the Sherman family. She has visions and prophecies of her future. After joining the Navy and becoming a war hero, she meets Garth, a single father, and falls in love with him precisely because of the way he loves his own children.

A love like no other bonds them, and their union drives the measure of the novel: "Garth and Melinda touched hurt and lost parts within one another with a magic spell that had taken all the bad things that had happened to each, and had in a moment made them into good things, by virtue of how these things had made them fit perfectly with one another." Weaver later explains the uniqueness of their inseparability: “It was as if their love affair and her political future as well his were all one and the same. They were married and it was also a marriage of superior capability and outstanding capacity. They would do nothing apart. They were two people in one.” Their love story forges a political powerhouse like no other. She has a magnetic persona and a platform that espouses humanity, tolerance, compassion, and reason. He has the experience, acumen, and commitment to help her rise through Congress to the presidency.

At once lofty with ideas, ambitious in scope, and erudite in style and presentation, this novel maintains its captivation and flow. In fact, it billows with life and knowledge as Weaver’s electric prose brings literary power to each chapter. His command of subject and character not only impresses, it mesmerizes. Although the book gives tribute to Dickens, the dynamic nature of his storytelling reminds me of classicists such as Steinbeck with his inimitable social commentary and contemporary talents such as Aleksander Hemon with his literary gifts and sharp humor, which often leave readers in awe over the originality of his details.

[EMH164 · Rating 1 out of 5]

Gender Politics Meets Political Fanfiction with All the Subtlety of a Campaign Ad

Gerald Weaver’s The First First Gentleman is the literary equivalent of someone patting themselves on the back for being “one of the good ones.” It attempts to present a timely and empowering narrative about America’s first female president, but instead delivers a clunky, tone-deaf mess that reads like a Lifetime movie written by someone who has never actually listened to a woman speak.

The premise — a wounded female war hero rising to the presidency and falling in love with her smooth-talking campaign manager — could have worked in the hands of a writer with even the slightest grasp of authentic dialogue, emotional nuance, or basic political realism. Instead, what we get is a bizarre mashup of hollow gender tropes, unearned romantic clichés, and a political fantasy so sanitized and contrived it feels like it was written by ChatGPT after bingeing The West Wing and misreading Lean In.

Melinda Sherman is touted as a strong, trailblazing heroine — but we’re told this more than we’re ever shown it. Her character is less a person than a political slogan with a backstory. Her trauma, her ambitions, her inner life — all are sacrificed to prop up a love story that’s somehow even more cliché than the campaign plotline. The romantic interest, of course, is a worldly, oh-so-wise man who guides her through her journey while simultaneously being her reward. Because what’s feminism without a man to validate it?

Weaver’s writing is bloated with speeches that sound like reheated op-eds, and not a single line of dialogue rings true. Every conversation sounds like a debate prep session, every plot twist is telegraphed from space, and every attempt at emotional depth is undercut by the author’s heavy hand and tin ear for tone. The themes of gender equality and political resilience are reduced to buzzwords and virtue signaling, with all the complexity of a bumper sticker.

What makes it worse is the clear sense that Weaver thinks he’s doing something important. But writing a book about a female president doesn’t automatically make it feminist — especially when her success is framed so heavily around her relationships with the men around her. Rather than challenging norms, The First First Gentleman reinforces them with a pink-painted smile.

At best, this book is political wish-fulfillment for centrists with zero understanding of how either women or elections work. At worst, it’s another man using a woman’s story as a stage to perform his own idea of progressiveness, wrapped in dated prose and cringe-worthy romantic tropes.

★☆☆☆☆ — Not so much a glass ceiling shattered as it is a cardboard cutout held up for applause.