State Champ

Bloomsbury presents State Champ by Hilary Plum, read by Suzanne Elise Freeman. '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.