Our June Book Club Pick: ‘State Champ’ by Hilary Plum
The novel is narrated by a wise-cracking admin worker at a reproductive healthcare clinic who launches a hunger strike after her boss is sent to prison for performing abortions after a new six-week cutoff.
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There were a few moments early on in State Champ when I almost walked away from it; the world in which this novel takes place is very much the contemporary United States, with all its attendant horrors and inequalities. Specifically, State Champ takes place in an unnamed Midwestern state (if you have any familiarity with northeastern Ohio, you’ll clock that it’s the suburbs of Cleveland, where author Hilary Plum also lives) where, in the novel, a “heartbeat bill” has recently come into effect. (Abortion is currently legal in Ohio up to 21 weeks.)
Despite—or maybe because of—this book’s obvious reflection of real life and the bleak abortion news updates we cover day in and day out here at Jezebel, I obviously kept reading, and now I’m here recommending it to you as our June book club pick. That’s primarily because of its narrator, Angela, a wise-cracking, fuckup 28-year-old receptionist at a reproductive healthcare clinic who launches a hunger strike in the shuttered clinic after its head doctor, Dr. M, is sentenced to 12 years in prison for continuing to perform abortions after six weeks.
Angela’s reasoning is simple: She wants Dr. M to be released. “I don’t think anyone else is still protesting for Dr. M. People will keep protesting the heartbeat law, or the next law up, which will ban every abortion in this state forever. … But everyone’s already forgetting about Dr. M,” she says on Day 3.