Tracy Flick Can't Win by Tom Perrotta

Tracy Flick Can't Win Reviews

• 
  Barbara

  4.5 Stars: I really wanted something different to read or listen to. I was in the mood for something witty, edgy, maybe dark, and certainly funny. Upon perusing the recently published novels, I saw Tom Perrotta has a new one out, “Tracy Flick Can’t Win”, and I thought, yep, that’s what I need.
  
  Perrotta does not disappoint. Yes, Tracy Flick is back, in her forties, and still that unaware, ambitious, and frustrated person she was thirty years ago. However, Perrotta didn’t set out to write a Tracy Flick story. He wanted to write about a middle-aged professional football player, with brain damage from all the concussions he endured, who is inducted into a local hall of fame. He must own up to all the cruel things he did to people in high school. Perrotta wanted to write an interesting angle to the #MeToo Movement. Since the football player had to reconcile his high school past, Perrotta had multiple narrators, most adults who had been hurt by the football player or some part of the football player’s history. Perrotta thought about Tracy Flick and realized that she would most likely still be at a high school, trying to be “president” or in the academic sense, Principal. Thus, he made Tracy vice principal; as the story opens, the principal is readying to retire. Tracy wants the job, expects the job, and is shocked when others are being considered.
  
  Tracy begins the story reading an article about a teacher at a prep school who’s been exposed as a sexual predator in his school. Some of the women who are accusing him are Tracy’s age; in other words, the sexual misconduct occurred decades ago. Once Tracy reads the accusations, she realizes that she was not “special”. She states, “I wasn’t an ordinary high school girl. I was an adult before my time.” ….but now she realizes, “Maybe I’m not special. Maybe I was manipulated or groomed in the way that these other girls were.” Now she’s realizing she was not special at all; she misjudged her past. Frustration mounts.
  
  Of course, Tracy feels she deserves being Principal because she still feels that the world should be a fair world. She has paid her dues. And here, Perrotta has fun with the male hierarchy. Or perhaps he’s poking fun at those brown-nosers, back-slappers, and glad handlers who slime their way to the top.
  
  It’s Perrotta’s clear wit in writing that makes this a joy. Tracy’s boss reminisces about the golden days when students smoked Marlboros in the bathroom, beat up gay kids and rated girls on a scale of 1 to 10. His feelings on the #MeToo, “It’s like the French Revolution. They had a just cause, but they got a little overzealous with the guillotine.” Who thinks like that?
  
  A subplot is the school creating a Hall of Fame. There is a Selection Committee, which Tracy is a part of. The nominees for the Hall of Fame are hysterical. The politics of choosing who should receive this award are realistic and amusing. Who do we honor? Who gets to say who we honor? Perrotta does expose our world’s interest in athletes, especially professional athletes; yet what value do they add to society? Why is a professional sports person held in higher esteem than a scientist who finds cures for diseases?
  
  I chose to listen to the audio, narrated by six commentators. The chapters are short and the dialogue switches often. I loved how the different narrators added to the story. Lucy Liu, Dennis Boutsikaris, Jeremy Bobb, Ramona Young, Ali Andre Ali and Pete Simonelli are the full cast. It was a joyful listen, and just what I wanted!
  
  I recommend it to Tom Perrotta fans. He has a particular dark wit which I totally enjoyed.
  
  
  
  
  
  
• 
  Dorie - Cats&Books :)

  This is going to be a DNF for me. I don't think I'm the right audience for this one and also, there's just nothing happening at 40% and I'm bored!
  
  You all enjoy it now :)
• 
  Tracy

  In Election, the first book in the Tracy Flick series learn about Tracy's trials and tribulations while running for student body President of her high school. She had no doubt she was the best person for the job and was determined to do whatever it took to win the election. Not to give anything away, I will say this experience fundamentally shook her.
  
  The series continues her story with Tracy Flick Can't Win. Tracy has just returned home after dropping out of Law school due to learning her mother has been ill for a while and is getting worse. Being an only child, Tracy doesn't think twice about giving up all her dreams to be there for her beloved mother. Even so, she is disappointed and saddened to give up her goals. She was determined and confident she was going to be President of the United States some day. She worked harder than anyone she knew and was a force to be reckoned with. Tracy firmly believes she is smarter and more capable than any of her peers.
  
  In the meantime, she is hired as the Vice Principal of her school. She does a fine job but thinks doing locker checks and correcting teenagers all day is beneath her qualifications and stature. When the Principal announces he is retiring she has no doubt she will be hired to take his position permanently. She even fills in for him will the board interviews other possible candidates and makes many positive and noticeable changes in a short time. Testing scores increase and the football team even starts winning the most games they have in years.
  
  The one thing Tracy doesn't excel at is social skills and playing politics. The board is not keen on hiring her as principal because they perceive her as being too egotistical and arrogant. She doesn't have a good grasp on human nature. White collar jobs absolutely want smart, successful and motivated employees. However, the personable, team-player is just as (if not more) important. . You have to wonder if Tracy is a heroine - being true to herself and standing up for what is fair - standing up for women - or is she being narcissistic and ludicrous because she adamantly refuses to play ball and be a team player. Even if the game is fixed. Sometimes playing the game gives you players who want to play on your team. Tracy's boss, Jack Weede tries to give her some perspective with this simple statement: "It's like the French Revolution. They had a just cause, but they got overzealous with the guillotine."
  
  The last few minutes of the book is beyond astounding and horrifying "Life suddenly, and startlingly, comes to match the intensity of Tracy's vision of it."
  Gotta get the book to find out what happens - So fun.
  
  The multi-cast of narrators created a simply phenomenal listening experience. Kudos to all.
• 
  Sam Quixote

  Tracy Flick’s a middle-aged single mom and working as an Assistant Principal at Green Meadow High School. And then she finds out her boss, Principal Jack Weede, is suddenly retiring - at last, a shot at being in charge! Except she needs the support of the school board whose president, a Silicon Valley millionaire, is dead set on giving the school an Alumni Hall of Fame. Its first inductee? A former NFL player. And just like that, Tracy’s right back to where she was in Election: in high school, struggling for power, and a football player’s involved. But this time she’ll win - right?
  
  We do live in the age of nostalgia so perhaps it’s not that surprising to see that Tom Perrotta has written a sequel to his late ‘90s novel, Election, even though it wasn’t a massive bestseller, or all that good. But here we are anyway, nearly 25 years later, with Election Part 2: Tracy Flick Can’t Win.
  
  I didn’t love it but I didn’t hate it either - this seems to be how I experience all of Perrotta’s novels. Election, Mrs Fletcher, and now Tracy Flick Can’t Win. They’re well-written, accessible, the characters are mildly interesting, but the stories themselves? So very forgettable. Honestly, I read Election less than 5 years ago and couldn’t recall a thing about it so I had to re-read a summary of it before picking this up.
  
  The story of this novel really isn’t edge-of-your-seat stuff either. Tracy’s going along with this Hall of Fame idea while waiting to interview for the job, and we get to know a myriad of other characters along the way. There’s Vito Falcone, the former NFL star, now an alcoholic much-married-much-divorced high school football coach; Jack Weede, the current principal with a somewhat sordid past; Kyle Dorfman, the tech millionaire; and a pair of students: Lily Chu, who’s dating a non-binary person, and Nate Cleary, who’s smitten with a YouTuber who does ASMR.
  
  Election was loosely about the ‘92 Clinton campaign - Tracy Flick Can’t Win doesn’t really seem to be about anything. There’s certainly a running theme: Vito, Jack, and Kyle are all cheating bastards, and, given how things play out for most of them, is the point some kind of social justice/MeToo thing against guys who used to hurt women’s feelings back in the day? I suppose it’s again a microcosm of the political world - Tracy once again having to play the game to get ahead - though the message seems to be… it’s gahbage? Eh.
  
  The thing is that Perrotta introduces a lot of interesting elements throughout the story: CTE, depression, mortality, addiction, ageing - but he doesn’t do anything with them. He throws them in and then immediately backs away from them rather than explore them deeper. The effect is very superficial and is why this novel doesn’t feel like it has any point.
  
  Despite not being a very long novel, it still feels heavily-padded out. The chapters are told from the characters’ perspectives and the students’ chapters, Lily and Nate, felt completely worthless. Why do we need to know about Lily’s romance with a non-binary (they/them) or Nate’s fascination with a YouTuber? Is this Perrotta’s concession to the times and is throwing them in to sound contemporary?
  
  The ending feels really forced, even melodramatic considering the mundanity of the story up to that point. Besides being flimsy and contrived, it also very conveniently sorts out Tracy’s problem - which also takes away any agency she has as a character. We think she’s going to do something about her problem but someone else does it for her - a man, no less. Girl power… ?
  
  All of which sounds like I hated the novel and I didn’t. Perrotta’s a fine writer, the novel is a smooth read, and you don’t need to have read Election to pick this one up. He also has a remarkable knack for character voices. Perrotta writes across genders and generations and makes each one sound convincing - that’s a helluva skill.
  
  And it was interesting to see what happened to Tracy Flick, the girl who was gonna be the first woman president of the USA and fell short of that ambition. But it’s also not a gripping story so it’s all too easy to put down. And, while I remember the story now, I’m certain I’ll end up forgetting it wholesale in no time, like I have with the other Perrotta novels I’ve read.
  
  Definitely not a must-read novel for anyone besides Tom Perrotta fans, Tracy Flick Can’t Win is still a decent, sometimes-entertaining read about life... or something?
• 
  Elyse Walters

  Not too shabby….
  Nope…..not too shabby at all!
  haha!!
  Very fast speedy fun read!
  
  “Mom, Sophia said. Are you okay?”
  “I’m fine honey”
  [can’t you just hear Reese Witherspoon‘s voice?]
  “I’m fine honey”.
  
  A fan of Tom Perrotta and his distinctive style?
  Enjoyed the book or movie, “Election”, with Reese Witherspoon playing the character role of Tracy Flick?….
  Then ….
  “Tracy Flick Can’t Win” …. the sequel to “Election”, should tickle your fancy.
  
  The chapters are noticeably short with shifting - provocative character viewpoints….
  but it’s our star-protagonist- Tracy Flick we are rooting for.
  
  Tracy is determined to prove her worth to the students, faculty, and school board, while also managing her personal life—a ten-year-old daughter, a needy doctor boyfriend, and a burgeoning meditation practice. But nothing comes easy to Tracy Flick, no matter how diligent or qualified she happens to be…..
  
  As an adult, a grown-up, an educator, Tracy Flint knew that what her drama teacher had done years ago was wrong.
  In the privacy of her own heart, though, she couldn’t manage to hate him for it, or even judge him that harshly. There was a migraing factor at work, and extenuating circumstance”.
  Tracy tells us that the circumstance with her. She wasn’t a normal high school girl. She was unusually smart and ambitious and way too mature for her own good.
  
  “I never wanted to be famous, not really. It was more that fame was the necessary precondition for, and inevitable by-product of, the thing I really did want, which was to be the first woman President of the United States”.
  “I know, there’s nothing more pathetic than a person talking about a dream that never happened, one that never even came close. It just makes you look like a fool. But being President wasn’t some girlish fantasy of mine, some cute little idea that dissolved at the first contact with reality”.
  “Being President was my ambition not my dream”.
  “There’s a difference”.
  
  “You failed”.
  “You did the best you could”.
  “You failed”.
  “You did the best you could”.
  “Both those statements were true, and I excepted the mixed verdict. I was an adult; I had no choice. But I desperately wanted to go back in time, to find the girl I used to be and tell her how sorry I was for letting her down, that fierce young woman who never had a chance, the one who got crushed”.
  
  Tracy Flick is more subdued this time around.
  She has mellowed in middle age.
  Setbacks are opportunities…
  She was strong, smart, a fighter, and she believed in herself!
  ….[the perils of a well-determined woman].
  
  Wonderful engaging comic novel….smart, funny, brutal and messy.
  
  Reading Tom Perrotta is as delicious as Häagen-Dazs rum raisin ice cream!
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
• 
  Jessica Woodbury

  I just re-read ELECTION because I wasn't sure if you needed to read it before reading this book. (My verdict: You will probably be fine without it.) I was surprised to find that the Tracy we all remember isn't the Tracy of the book. And that I found the Tracy of the book impossible to understand, more of an object or a plot device than a real person. The Tracy of this book is a fuller character who makes sense most of the time, although she is still prone to out-of-character outbursts when under pressure. The biggest thing I had an issue with is that I just cannot believe that Tracy would work in a school. I understand how the book explains this to us but I simply cannot accept it. Tracy, as best I understood her, would hate working with teenagers. But, again, we need this to be the case so that the plot works. Tracy is consistently inconsistent, at least.
  
  As Perrotta is wont to do, there are a lot of elements here that feel relevant to our current moment, including a reckoning with sexual misconduct. But this time I think he takes too much on, gives us too many characters, and adds on a too-much climax.
  
  I was really hoping for a reckoning with Election, as re-reading it was often unpleasant for me. It was full of middle-aged men not only sleeping with their teenage students, but making comments about their bodies regularly. I was hoping we could address all that, confront it somehow, but even Tracy is not quite all the way ready to confront her own past.
  
  Perrotta is a good writer and he is good at pulling you through a story and he creates some interesting characters here. There just isn't much there there.
• 
  Olive Fellows (abookolive)

  Tracy Flick, the intensely ambitious candidate for student body president of her high school, was inarguably the star of Tom Perrotta’s short, but explosive 1998 novel “Election.” She became an even more notable character in 1999, after Reese Witherspoon played her in the cult classic movie adaptation of the same name. In both the book and the film, the teenaged Tracy campaigns hard for the job she knows she deserves, but a male teacher at her high school - a civics teacher, no less - first subtly, then brazenly tries to interfere with the election and prevent her rightful victory.
  
  “Election” was a dark comedy set in New Jersey that turned the volume up on the hushed drama of the suburbs. It doubled as a challenge to its suburbanite readers: What are you capable of, if you grow bored enough? It’s a question author Tom Perrotta may have been asking himself in the early days of the pandemic, thinking back to Tracy Flick, class of 1993, and wondering what she would be up to in the 21st century. No other train of thought could explain “Tracy Flick Can’t Win,” the newly released sequel to “Election.”
  
  
  Click here to read the rest of my review in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette!
• 
  Tim

  Tragedy. A number of stories featuring varying characters, including abuse, victimization and using blacks for fodder. 3 of 10 stars
• 
  Ron Charles

  When we last saw Tracy Flick, the ambitious high school girl in Tom Perrotta’s 1998 novel, “Election,” she’d been named student body president. But hers was a soiled victory that came only after a humiliating recount.
  
  “Despite the actual outcome of the election, I still felt like a loser,” Tracy says. When the first — fraudulent — results were announced, “I stood up by mistake and was laughed at by hundreds of people. There was something true in that laughter, a truth I felt would taint every good thing in my life for years to come.”
  
  She’s right: There was something true in that laughter, but it’s something true about us, not her. Ever since Reese Witherspoon immortalized Tracy in the movie version of “Election,” determined women have been labeled Tracy Flicks. It’s a handy slur to disparage female ambition, to laugh off the efforts of smart women who try too hard.
  
  Now, Tracy is back. . . .
  
  To read the rest of this review, go to The Washington Post:
  
  https://www.washingtonpost.com/books/...
• 
  Maria

  I feel like I probably should have read Election first.
  
  Since I didn't there is probably some context and backstory I missed, however as a stand alone I found this book pretty enjoyable.
  
  I love multiple points of view and I thought each character was well written. There was a certain completeness to the main characters and all characters had a distinctly unique voice.
  
  Overall this was a very fast read, pretty engaging and I would recommend it.
• 
  Donna P

  3.5 stars. I loved Election…both the book and the film, so I was ecstatic when I learned Tom Perrotta had written a sequel that centered around what happened to Tracy Flick after high school. I was thoroughly enjoying the book until the ending, which seemed completely preposterous. I’m still glad I read it…but in the end, it didn’t meet my high expectations.
• 
  Andrew Shaffer

  According to an interview with Entertainment Weekly, Tom Perrotta was writing a new book about high school and small-town politics when he worried he was just covering the same ground as ELECTION. But that didn't stop him--in fact, it gave him a hook for the novel. "I suddenly realized that the novel needed something else," he said. "I was basically summoning Tracy to help me write this book, because she was at the center of all these ideas."
  
  This helps explain why Tracy Flick, last seen over twenty years ago in ELECTION, feels like an afterthought here. She's one of ten or so narrators. She should be the star here, but is constantly lost in the shuffle. There's a retiring principal and his secretary. A tech guru and his wife. A former football star. Multiple chapters are devoted to a pair of rather boring students (who barely interact with Tracy, and seem teleported in from an alternate book).
  
  Once the plot gets rolling, it's a quick page-turner. I finished it in two sittings. The quick cuts between all of the various characters was at times jarring, especially since some are written in first person and some in third. If Perrotta had stuck to Tracy's point of view the entire time, I think it would have felt like a more satisfying read. Her name is right there in the title! In a storyline where Tracy is fighting to get her proper due, what does it say when even the author won't give her the time of day?
• 
  Victoria

  Tracy Flick Can’t Win is a follow up to Tome Perotta’s book Election, and I was really hoping to absolutely love this read, and that was just not fully the case for me here. I enjoyed reading this book, don’t get me wrong, and I think that if you were a fan of Election, then you should give this a read. However, I felt the stories of each character and the jumping between character viewpoints to be a bit disjointed and ended up not fully coming together for me.
  
  I also believe that if you plan on going into this book thinking this is the same Tracy Flick from Election, then you may find yourself disappointed because this felt like an entirely different person. Obviously, this is her now as an older woman, but it didn’t feel like there was much of her old personality left at all, which also could be the point. This was a very quick read, and had some great moments, I just felt like I was expecting something more. The ending is jarring, although you can predict what is to come from about halfway through.
  
  Overall, I am mainly just conflicted on how I felt about this. It is a book you can read in one sitting, it is an enjoyable read, and it has a definite nostalgia factor if you loved Election, but it also leaves you wanting something more.
  
  Many thanks to Scribner for providing me with an ARC of this book in exchange for this honest review!
  
• 
  Erin Clemence

  Special thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for a free, electronic ARC of this novel received in exchange for an honest review.
  
  Expected publication date: June 7, 2022
  
  Tracy Flick is back, now an overachieving vice principal at a public high school. A single mother, Tracy’s life is stuck in a rut until she receives news that the principal of her school is finally retiring, and, in pure Flick style, Tracy sets her sights on the position. As Tracy battles administrative red tape, including hob knobbing with the Superintendent and school board trustees, she is also tasked with nominating local alumni for the High School Hall of Fame. But the nomination process has Tracy reflecting back on her past, and the bad memories that came with it, which makes Tracy all the more determined to rise above and become the next Principal.
  
  
  Tom Perrotta brings Tracy Flick back to the page with “Tracy Flick Can’t Win”. Flick’s character was made famous in the movie (based on the book) “
  Election”, helmed by the fabulous Reese Witherspoon, and now, as an adult, Flick is still an uptight success-driven Type A, setting hew new sights on a new role.
  
  The novel has short chapters, each narrated by different characters in the novel; Tracy, of course, but also two students who sit on the nomination board; Vito, a former NFL quarterback who leads the nominations for the Hall of Fame; Jack, the outgoing principal; Kyle Dorfmann, the young and exceptionally wealthy trustee who recruits Tracy for his Hall of Fame project and finally, the head secretary who also has a nomination for her years of service. Through each character, their background and relationships to each other are examined, as the battle for the Hall of Fame is fought. Tracy Flick plays a prominent role in the novel of course, but the amount of other characters was unexpected, and I did not expect to see so little of Tracy (although I loved her just as much as I did in “
  Election”). Although initially the additional characters seem extraneous, they tie together very nicely by the final pages.
  
  “Tracy Flick Can’t Win” is a story of the patriarchy of the education system and school board red tape and politics, so it definitely won’t appeal to everyone. It does however, have a great deal of truth and realism, and depicts the male-dominated, #metoo world of administration and leadership.
  
  The ending was unexpected and shocking, but Perrotta ensured that all of his characters received a satisfying conclusion to their plotlines.
  
  Perrotta writes very well, and each chapter was easy to read. His characters are relatable and well-developed, and there is no arguing that Perrotta has earned his many accolades. As someone who sees myself in Tracy (in far too many ways), I will always hold a soft spot for the goal-seeking, driven woman, now a dysfunctional adult trying to succeed in a male dominated world. I loved that Perrotta brought Flick back and I hope to see more of her.
  
• 
  Rebecca

  A sequel to Election, which you might remember as a late-1990s Reese Witherspoon film even if you don’t know Perrotta’s fiction. Tracy Flick was the goody two-shoes student who ran for school president and had her campaign tampered with. Now in her forties, she’s an assistant principal at a high school and a single mother. Missing her late mother and wishing she’d completed law school, she fears she’ll be passed over for the top job when the principal retires. This is something of an attempt to update the author’s laddish style for the #MeToo era. Interspersed with the third-person narration are snappy first-person testimonials from Tracy, the principal, a couple of students, and the washed-up football star the school chooses to launch its new Hall of Fame. I can’t think of any specific objections, but nor can I think of any reason why you should read this.
• 
  Jim Thomsen

  I always close a Tom Perrotta novel with the feeling of having been pleasantly massaged, with brain cells and nerve endings bristling the way they do when I'm in the presence of a creator with equal parts emotional and cerebral intelligence. TRACY FLICK CAN'T WIN is no exception, and the only wonder is why I ever wondered why I might have worried about having a different experience.
  
  You can read about the setup elsewhere, how things have changed for Tracy Flick in the 24 years since ELECTION, but suffice to say that TRACY FLICK CAN'T WIN is NOT fan service for ELECTION admirers (though I sincerely hope there is a film adaptation of it, and that Reese Witherspoon jumps into the role with weapons-grade enthusiasm). The ELECTION gang does NOT get back together. While Tracy reflects on the events of ELECTION, it's clear that those events are largely in her rearview mirror, and she has no contact with anyone from that time, and she doesn't want it. She's finally accepting that she's as much victim as antagonist, even if that means setting aside her own carefully nurtured sense of exceptionalism:
  
  "The thing you had to understand—it seemed so obvious to me at the time, so central to my identity—is that I wasn’t a normal high school girl. I was unusually smart and ambitious, way too mature for my own good, to the point where I had trouble making friends with my peers, or even connecting with them in a meaningful way. I felt like an adult long before I came of legal age, and it had always seemed to me that Mr. Dexter simply perceived this truth before anyone else, and had treated me accordingly, which was exactly the way I’d wanted to be treated. How could I blame him for that?
  
  "That was my narrative, the one I’d lived with for a very long time, but it was starting to feel a little shaky. You can’t keep reading these stories, one after the other, all these high-achieving young women exploited by teachers and mentors and bosses, and keep clinging to the idea that your own case was unique. In fact, it had become pretty clear to me that that was how it worked—you got tricked into feeling more exceptional than you actually were, like the normal rules no longer applied.
  
  "It gnawed at me that summer, the possibility that I’d misjudged my own past, that maybe I’d been a little more ordinary than I would have liked to believe. But even if that were true, there wasn’t anything I could do about it. There was no injustice to expose, no serial abuser living it up in a tropical paradise."
  
  That said, Perrotta cleverly infuses TRACY FLICK CAN'T WIN with a plot and stakes that neatly claps back to ELECTION: Tracy Flick, now an assistant principal at a New Jersey high school, is in line for the top job, until events and a few people with their own agendas appear to conspire to undermine her promotion. Tracy Flick is still Tracy Flick enough, utterly intolerant of mediocrity on her watch, not to take any setbacks lying down ... but how far will she go in the service of standing up?
  
  That question hangs over the entire novel, and makes it thrum with a pulsing pleasurably uncertainty that keeps the pages turning even as the reader lingers on its Easter egg insights into human behavior, such as: "It wasn’t much of an affair. A couple of coffee dates, a fancy dinner, and one rainy weekend at an inn in Vermont, where we had pretty good sex in a very nice bed, but ended up in a prolonged dispute about Rudolf Steiner that consumed the rest of our stay and the entire drive home, at the end of which Daniel informed me that I was exhausting and relentless, and that he didn’t think we should see each other anymore, and I said that was fine with me. If not for Sophia, inadvertently conceived before we drifted onto the topic of Waldorf Schools, I would have been a minor chapter in Daniel’s midlife crisis. He’d thought he wanted something different—a younger woman, a new beginning—but the time he spent with me helped him realize that his marriage was worth saving, so I guess he has two things to thank me for."
  
  The cast of TRACY FLICK CAN'T WIN is strong, though a tad overpopulated, with some POV characters serving more as plot catalysts for others than as their own people. I especially like Jack Weede, the retiring principal, who is not a horrible person despite that fact that he had a long-running affair with "Front Desk Diane"; and Kyle Dorfman, the aggressively self-aggrandizing school-board member who is a less-than-unreliable promoter of Tracy Flick's aspirations to the extent that they serve his own. (Especially great is the portrait of a certain kind of school-board members everywhere: the retired CEO or officer who is at loose ends and needs a focus for that surplus of alpha energy.)
  
  Things come to a head in a way that has a "God in the machine" feel to it, a tad cauterized and cut short, but no less devasting in its impact for its abruptness. Perrotta's particular skill is in conveying much through as few words as possible without ever seeming minimalist; in fact, his prose creates a sense of warm, benevolent generosity to the worlds he creates, much as the suburbs he depicts are designed to.
  
  All of which is to say that I loved TRACY FLICK CAN'T WIN, love Tracy Flick in all her messy glory, and was happy that Tom Perrotta chose to check in on her without feeling the need to wink to the ELECTION audience — or to tongue-bathe it. In doing so, he pleases without ever seeming to be trying to please, with a gift many novelists of greater acclaim don't have.
• 
  Michael McEvoy

  I was expecting the sequel of Election to be centred around Tracy Flick, but there is a large cast of main characters that makes up this story. Unfortunately I didn’t really feel a connection to any of them, I think probably because they weren’t given much depth. The ending seemed a bit unbelievable.
• 
  Amy

  Do not go near this useless book. There is absolutely nothing remotely of value.
• 
  Bryan House

  I love Tom Perrotta. I love him. Gah. Don't get me started. I also think a sequel to Election is a wonderful idea, and revisiting Tracy Flick in a more modern political enviroment could really be something eye opening and special.
  
  The book is bad. It's just completely forgettable. I was going to be nice, but the ending of this book (in my opinion) is horrendously bad. Bad. Bad. Bad. It's all I can think. BAD.
  
  I struggled to find any connection to ANY of the MANY MANY characters of the book. Too many characters with too little to say. I'm awestruck.
  
  I spent all day reading this book and will spend the next 20 minutes forgetting It exists. Wildly dissapointed.
  
  Typically when reading Perotta books it feels like I'm watching trailers for Super Smash Bros new characters. Every time a new perspective is introduced I think "A NEW CHALLENGER APPROACHES" And I'm so excited for the extra layer of Nuance and Perspective. Out of ALL Perrotta books I've read, this has the WEAKEST characters that add no Nuance or any Perspective to the overall story. It feels like an off brand attempt at Perotta.
  
  The cover of the book is an accurate representation of me finishing this mess.
  
  Imma stop ranting now so I don't go on forever.
• 
  Caitlin

  Needed more Front Desk Diane.
• 
  Jason Pettus

  2022 reads, #33. I'm a fan of Tom Perrotta, and have read now almost every novel he's ever written, even though I admit that he's also inconsistent (The Abstinence Teacher and Mrs. Fletcher will almost never be revisited by future readers again, I think), and that it's honest to say that most of the TV and movie adaptations of his work (including Little Children and The Leftovers, among others) are actually better than the books themselves, because Perrotta is great at setting things up but only so-so at knocking them down. So that's why I was excited to hear that he'd recently written a sequel to his 1998 Election, still to this day one of the best books of his career, in which through a perfect storm of dysfunctional adults with hidden agendas and overly ambitious, unlikable teens (including our crafty anti-hero Tracy Flick, who Reese Witherspoon played to such perfection in the movie adaptation), the boring election of a high-school class president in suburban New Jersey blows up into an attention-causing disaster that ruins several people's lives and ends several people's careers.
  
  A lot of people don't realize this, but despite the movie version (adapted and directed by the now famous Alexander Payne) being a dark comedy, the novel it's based on is actually a quite serious drama, as are surprisingly almost all of Perrotta's books, despite all the adaptations being known in one way or another for their dry wit; and so should you be prepared as well for this newest, because despite the cutesy title and cover art, this is a sometimes wrist-slashingly depressive look at late middle-age, the first moment of most people's lives when it suddenly dawns on them that it's simply too late to achieve some of their childhood dreams before they likely die, and react in various ways but always with a deep undercurrent of sadness to them all. That's certainly the case with Flick, who's now in her forties in this contemporarily-set sequel, who as people remember from the previous novel had been ambitious as hell all the way through her early twenties, before suddenly her mother got sick and she was forced back home halfway through law school, never to finish her degree but instead getting started at a temp agency when she first arrived back home, which then transitioned into a substitute teacher job, then a full-time job, then her bare rise through the ranks to a soul-beaten perpetual assistant principal now.
  
  LIke the previous novel, there's an election going on here too, and in fact not one but two -- not only for a new principal, which Flick is a kinda-sorta-favorite for (no one's forgotten how haughty and ambitious she had been when younger), but then also choosing the first honorees for the high school's brand-new "Hall of Fame" program, the brainchild of a tech-industry millionaire who's also moved back to his hometown (although by "tech industry," I mean on a lark he invented one of those goofy "Angry Birds" type useless phone apps that suddenly becomes a viral hit and is bought by tens of millions of people before then being forgotten again a year later), who is dismayed that the town voted down the latest bond issue to fund their rapidly falling apart local high school, so self-funds this flashy, high-profile Hall of Fame idea to try to get local citizens worked up and excited about getting their school back in order. And why didn't he just fund the actual school's real issues with this Hall of Fame money? Well, you never ask those kinds of questions in a Perrotta novel, because the answer's always the same -- because ultimately this lucky app lottery winner is doing it all for himself and his own personal glory, and wants it to be as showy a personal project as it possibly can, exactly like how the first thing he does when moving back to his hometown is buy a plot of land on the rich side of town and then build a Postmodernist monstrosity of a mansion, three Jenga-like boxes stacked haphazardly on top of each other, the various ways it's reacted to and used by the various characters becoming this lovely central hook off which to hang the plot that spins around it.
  
  Not-so-spoiler alert: The two goofiest white bros in town become the favorites for both elections, which is kind of Perrotta's point here, that even in our Woke age it's these buffoons who still largely end up on top in most situations. But that's not the point anyway here, but rather to use this situation to peek behind the curtain of all these forties-to-sixties characters and see the deeply broken spirits behind all of them, the crushing pain of being in these blandly okay places in their lives and having lost all ambition or energy to want more than that anymore. As Flick says to herself at one point, "You failed. You did the best you could. Both those statements were true, and I accepted the mixed verdict. I was an adult; I had no choice. But I desperately wanted to go back in time, to find the girl I used to be and tell her how sorry I was for letting her down, that fierce young woman who never had a chance, the one who got crushed." That's essentially this book in a nutshell, whether that's the star quarterback now humiliatingly revisiting all the people he'd been a dick to while an alcoholic his twenties, or the milquetoast nobody who worked the school's front desk for 30 years, is about to retire, and is asking herself what it was all for, anyway?
  
  As in the best of his books, Perrotta asks these kinds of deeply existential questions within these bland environments of quiet suburbs and their long-suffering citizens; so in this, you can think of Perrotta at his best as sorta Updike Lite, easier to digest and not quite as cruel but still in that wheelhouse of Mad Men-esque "5:47 to Ossining" territory, and of course with both the authors owing a big bow of respect to John Cheever who essentially invented the genre. If you're going to like Perrotta, that's the spirit in which to read him, as the logical end game of the arrow begun by Cheever and pushed along by '70s and '80s Postmodernism, understanding that he's not really telling any new stories in any of his agreeable, easy-to-read novels, but doing a great job at telling updated versions of stories you already know. As always with him, today's book comes recommended in that specific spirit.
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  sydney

  Tom perotta you are a deeply weird man who has basically learned nothing in the past couple decades. You may have invented her but i want you to stay far far away from Tracy flick for the rest of all time
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  Lucía Xochimitl

  This is not a funny feel good book, this is the preamble to a big event, the who and why of a tragedy.
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  Jennifer Wright

  Totally winning
  
  I love Tracy Flick. I'm probably not the first ambitious woman to see shades of myself in her. And one of the comforts of Election is the promise that, after being raped and isolated and generally treated less than kindly by adults, Tracy will go to Georgetown and pursue her huge dreams. So when I saw in the summary that she was a vice principal of a high school I was so scared this book would just read as an extended sneer directed towards her. It doesn't. At all. It's beautifully humanizing. It's an examination of the very normal things that can get in the way of dreams, and how great success can sometimes, infuriatingly, depend as much on luck as anything else (and that success doesn't always last forever.) It also seems like a bit of a welcome apology from the author about the idea that a 15 year old having sex with her teacher was fine and wouldn't have any long term consequences. It's a perfect ending for Tracy some thirty years after she was first introduced.
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  britt_brooke

  Many years post-Election, this follows the same formatting, same tone. The characters are somewhat flat, but realistic enough. With multiple POV and a fairly low page count, the style works very well. Tracy’s arc was my favorite especially when ruminating on high school. But, I hated - HATED - the ending. Absolutely ruined the book.
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  Jon Zelazny

  "The novel was too confusing. It just kept skipping around. I didn't know whose head I was in." - pg. 124
  
  My first Perrotta, a droll contemporary comedy of manners set in some Everywhere American suburb in decline, and what I liked most is how you don't feel him straining on every page to be Jonathan Franzen, or turn this into the next CORRECTIONS. It's short and understated, goes down smooth and easy, like a wine cooler, and depicts a wide array of loneliness, regret, thwarted dreams, and lives gone nowhere without making you want to stick a gun in your own mouth.
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  Max Ellithorpe

  I didn't read Election, though I saw the movie, but was so excited to receive an ARC of this book thanks to the publisher. Tom Perrotta is an expert at putting together great character driven novels and this was no exception. This book is perfect for fans of Big Little Lies and anything by Gary Shteyngart. Full of wit and satire, and told from the perspective of multiple characters, I could not put this down. This book will do well on the bookshelves.
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  Deborah

  If you fondly remember Election, Tom Perrotta’s 1998 satirical novel about a high school election, or the film of the same name, featuring Reese Witherspoon as the irrepressible, boundlessly ambitious, endlessly energetic Tracy Flick, running for high school president, you’ll be drawn to this 2022 follow-up of Tracy’s life story. But it’s not necessary to have read Election to appreciate this book; it works well as a standalone. Tracy is now 40-ish, a single mother of a 10-year-old daughter, and vice-principal of a suburban New Jersey high school. This is not at all how she pictured her life when she was 20-something and two years into the law program at Georgetown University, her sights set on an eventual career in politics. But life was not kind to her plans; admirable Tracy withdrew from law school to look after her ailing mother, and here she is. But she’s dazzlingly competent at her job and still ambitious—when the current principal of the school announces he’s retiring, Tracy is re-energized to compete for the post. She figures she has all her ducks in a row: a recent successful period as acting principal, good relations with the members of the school board, etc, etc. She seems like a lock. So why does she sense something going subtly awry and the principal post slipping from her grasp?
  
  Beautifully told in a chorus of voices, Tracy’s own, of course, the retiring principal’s, a couple of students’, a tech billionaire who’s returned to his hometown, a former high school football hero who went on to an undistinguished brief NFL career and a train wreck of a life beyond who’s coming home to be honoured, etc. This is a darkly comic satire of 21st-century life. You can’t help but pull for Tracy, so chastened by life but unbowed. Funny and sad—I guess that makes this bittersweet? Whatever, I very much enjoyed this and heartily recommend it.
  
  Many thanks to Netgalley and the publisher for an ARC. Goodreads says the expected publication date is June 7.
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  Susan Ballard

  I hadn’t experienced a Tom Perrotta book before, so I was thrilled when @dartfroggco and @scribnerbooks gifted me a copy of 𝐓𝐫𝐚𝐜𝐲 𝐅𝐥𝐢𝐜𝐤 𝐂𝐚𝐧’𝐭 𝐖𝐢𝐧.
  
  Notice I said “experienced” a Tom Perrotta book? Let me try to explain. Here I am jumping in, having not read the first book 𝐄𝐥𝐞𝐜𝐭𝐢𝐨𝐧, which was made into a movie that I didn’t see either. Regardless, I immediately became engrossed with these characters as they seem to be looking back on their lives with a new filter.
  
  Tracy Flick is still in high school, but now she is Green Meadow High’s disgruntled Assistant Principal. Her boss is looking to retire in the next year, and it would seem to reason that she is the perfect candidate for the job, but she can’t help but feel like there are forces, aka men, working against her. Plus, she has to deal with this new Hall of Fame project where Green Meadow wants to honor some old football star; Tracy wants to nominate a musician or, heck, even a stay-at-home mom.
  
  So, apparently, I missed out on not having read 𝐄𝐥𝐞𝐜𝐭𝐢𝐨𝐧 because I thoroughly enjoyed Tracy as an adult. I like a character that can say what she means, even if it makes people a little uncomfortable, and I think that’s what we get with Tracy. I think that’s what we get with Tom Perotta; that’s why I felt his writing was an experience. This has been called a dark comedy, but I think it’s just people being authentic, saying things we might all be thinking.