I was at the library to pick up fiction books and I saw?? a book called Feel the Bern labelled as a Bernie Sanders Mystery with the cover being the meme photo of him made by a guy who apparently made “Obama Biden Mysteries” which I guessed were probably inspired by the 2016 Obama and Biden memes and now the author has written and published Bernie Sanders RPF in the year 2022 and the Auckland Library system had gotten it for some reason
I got it out in bewilderment (I hid it under a translation of Journey to the West) and went home to read and in the first few pages there’s the line “Playing therapist for sloshed, emotionally wounded men is less fun than it sounds.” and my first thought is, who thinks that’s fun? No one likes doing that. Many Words have been Written about how if you’re a woman cis men expect you to do emotional labour for them
The protagonist has named herself Crash because there are probably no other girls named Crash and “like Alexander Hamilton, I had to shoot my shot” and then on page four when she’s entering the campaign office she goes “I hear this is where coal is turned to diamonds!” and Bernie Sanders, subject of the novel frowns and says “We support clean energy here”
The book is filled with little performative preachy moments like they just inserted a tweet right into the text. There’s a comment “about as likely as Elon Musk getting to mars” or “if Bernie is up this early there’s something wrong in the world! Well, there’s always something wrong in the world, see abortion rights and indigenous rights and unregulated capitalism”. This is constant?
I mentioned “playing therapist for emotionally wounded men is less fun than it sounds” earlier, it’s like they took the common phrase “less fun than it sounds” and then mismatched it with the subject of doing something that is already un-fun. There’s one section where the narration goes “There’s a special place in hell for people who don’t turn on their read receipts. It takes two seconds, people!” and I remember that read receipts are typically turned on by default, and that I personally like to turn them off because being left on read is a rude thing to do and I often can’t find time to reply in the moment that I read it. It’s just conflict.
Sometimes in media, jokes are “correct, but not funny”, like when a character gives a parting shot to a fantastical natural disaster with “and people don’t listen to the climate scientists still!” which, yeah Correct but not funny. This book is full of those sorts of things, there’s a section where the small town holding a beauty pageant is mentioned and that it’s less sexist because it trades a swimsuit round for a flannel shirt round, and the protagonist recounts being entered in at ten years old and giving a speech condemning the male gaze, capping it off with “I am a woman, not an object” and like… okay? Good for you and the less misogynist beauty pageant? Am I meant to be impressed that the book has okay politics? Is it meant to be funny?
I looked up the author because I became briefly convinced that the book was made by a conservative trying to make fun of liberals and found his webpage to verify that no, this guy is in fact liberal:
I checked, I was a smidge surprised to see an OnlyFans on a business page, clicking it takes you to a tasteful nude and “you pervert!”)
I think there was an attempt to give the main character’s voice some Twitter-y flavour but that’s not a very pleasant or funny flavour, and the thing about a good tweet is you go “oh that’s so True” and I didn’t ever have that moment reading this book because it’s a more milquetoast, smug, disconnected liberal version of my own politics being reflected back at me.
I don’t like Elon Musk either but also I think it’s weird that the cop character is immediately stated to be gay and that the protagonist’s feelings on the police were decided by “The sheriff’s daughter when I was in high school was mean”. Did you make the cop gay to go “don’t worry he’s a good cop”? There’s so many sledgehammer blunt reminders of The Time This Takes Place In and the State Of The World the lack of references to the 2020 Black Lives Matter protests in regards to the police is conspicuous.
The actual plot of the novel is someone is murdered and Bernie and Crash Bandicoot have to solve it, and there’s some ties to not-Elon Musk trying to become a maple syrup tycoon and push out all the real good Vermont maple syrup. There are other characters but they’re barely important, it strongly feels like book’s actual content exists to carry the concept of “Bernie Sanders mystery novel” and thus the content is extremely uninteresting, and actually quite short.
There isn’t a real mystery here, there’s no intrigue. There’s repeated references to a fictional mystery novel about a weed bakery murder and a short excerpt, because I guess weed dispensaries are a progressive topic and you could theoretically make a silly mystery novel around it. The murder happens like 30 pages in and it feels like ticking a checkbox on writing the Bernie Sanders mystery novel rather than Wanting To Write A Mystery Novel.
The actual book appears to be 210~ pages long and the last 30 pages are recipes adapted from various online sources or historical cookbooks (mostly the internet) themed around Vermont, New England, or maple syrup. The recipes claim to be adapted from their original sources and I went looking for one of them and found they had indeed made some alterations to the originals, so whatever. They feel crammed in at the end to make the book look longer, a 210-page book with a relatively large font and new chapters every 4 pages feels unusually short. I stole some of the recipes for my database and I will probably not cook any of them
More on confusing segments, there’s a part where protagonist and subject of the book Bernie Sanders get swarmed by bees in the car, three bees crawl through the airvents and the protagonist instinctively grabs a shoe to try and kill them and Bernie is like “no! Wait! We can’t kill any bees, they’re endangered!” (as far as I know, America has been able to deal with bee decline and the real issue is more that native bees are being crowded out by other ones??) and there’s an exchange (paraphrased) “Nobody’s perfect. Not even Obama. Maybe Michelle.” and I can tell so much about the audience of the book with that line.
The very very end of the book is, in about 100 words, the protagonist sees a hand sticking out from the snow and clears the snow around it and discovers in fact a whole body, and then texts senator Bernie Sanders with the following text exchange:
“Got your card, also found another dead body”
“In DC or Eagle Creek?”
“Do you have to ask? :)”
Girl you found a dead body what is this. You were too calm about the first one but they just drop another body being found in the last half page and it’s capped off with a smiley face with a fond text conversation. It’s so paint by numbers you could swap out the murder for literally any other crime or happening in the town and nothing would change.
This is fanfiction, but fanfiction has more love than this put into it. I feel weird about finding this book in the library because obviously I’m not American and it’s weird to find a product of Americans having a parasocial relationship with a politician (albeit, one of the best in the country) in my library. I also personally think a lot of RPF is weird/invasive (though with politicians I’m not really concerned) but even then.
There’s a fandom tag on AO3 ‘Political RPF – US 21st c’. And if you go there you will probably find a fair bit of Bernie Sanders RPF. To be fair the American RPF politics tag on AO3 is mostly used by people doing little acts of protest against the US government, there is a lot of “I hate these people so I’m going to write them pregnant”. But it’s done for free and it comes directly from the heart, even if it is in anger.
Anyway, this book seems like it was hammered out on its concept alone and nothing else, gave no weight to any of its subject matter besides ticking boxes in making a mystery novel, has annoying narration, unchallenging politics, and damn, I sure found it in a New Zealand library?