Alexandra Ripley

[memelaina]

Sandy Ripley died recently. She was a really cool lady and a talented writer. Her best known book (Scarlett) was nowhere near her best, but she did a pretty good job with the bag of cats they handed her. I'm looking at re-reading some of her books - my favorites are Charleston and Leaving Charleston. When I read her obituary, I saw a book I had never known of called Who's that Lady in the President's Bed? I got it through interlibrary loan and read it over the past couple of days. It was kind of fun. A somewhat simplistic pastiche of 1970s politics where a woman school teacher gets elected president when a group has put her in on a joke ticket and people vote for her purely because they hate the traditional candidates. It reminded me of the Leonard Wibberly political humor books (Mouse that Roared, etc.) Apparently this was the first book she published, quite a few years before she started writing historical novels about the South.