Christine Grillo: Hestia Strikes a Match

Join us at C. Burr Artz Public Library as we celebrate local author Christine Grillo’s debut novel Hestia Strikes a Match, a slyly funny story of a woman looking for love and friendship in the midst of a new American civil war. Christine will talk about her novel, answer questions, and sign books.

This event is presented in partnership with Frederick County Public Libraries. Event is free and open to the public. Books will be available for purchase and signing at the event. ASL interpreter requests must be made at least two weeks prior to the event here.

About the book: Unionists against Confederates, children against parents, friends against friends: The year is 2023 and the United States has collapsed into another bloody civil war. Hestia Harris is forty, newly single by virtue of abandonment for the Union cause, and her parents are absconding to the Confederacy. She is adrift, save for her coworkers at the retirement village and her best friend, Mildred, an eighty-four-year-old resident, who gleefully supports Hestia’s somewhat half-hearted but nonetheless hopeful attempts to find love in a time of chaos and disunion. Let’s Not Date a Confederate! Hestia avers as her parents put up a sign proclaiming Make Liberals Feel Sad and Mildred reminds her It’ll pass . . . It always does.

For fans of Maria Semple, Andrew Sean Greer, Ling Ma, and Gail Honeyman, 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. As it fills your heart to fend off despair, it asks the seemingly ever-relevant question: How do you embrace an entire life when the whole world is breaking into bits and madness?

About the author: Christine Grillo is a writer and editor covering food systems, agriculture, and climate change, whose nonfiction has been published in outlets such as The New York Times, The Atlantic: CityLab, Audubon, NextTribe, and Real Simple. Her short fiction has appeared in Story Quarterly, The Southern Review, and LIT. Hestia Strikes a Match is her first novel.