Book of the Week: Long May She Reign

Meg Powers is back!  The smart, snarky, courageous daughter of the first female president of the United States, last seen back in 1989 in the ALA Best Book for Young Adults Long Live the Queen (currently, and very sadly, out of print) finally gets her chance to go to college. Long May She Reign is actually the fourth book in what used to be a trilogy, but it can easily stand alone.

Meg is trying, not very successfully, to recover from being kidnapping by terrorists. She was starved, beaten, had her knee viciously kicked to ruins, and was then left chained to the ground in an abandoned mine to die.  She escaped by smashing her hand with a rock, so it would fit through the handcuff, and crawling through the woods until she found help. Enough to traumatize anyone, but to top it all off, in Long May She Reign we learn that the terrorists are still out there. Somewhere. Anywhere.

So Meg, in addition to the normal pressures of starting college, has to deal with the nightmares and after-effects of the kidnapping, which include physical therapy and food issues. Then there's the press always following her, because she is a celebrity now. And to top it all off, there's the fact that her mother is the president, and her mother, as president, refused to negotiate with the terrorists. Meg is attempting to come to terms with the fact that her mother basically wrote her own daughter off.  Talk about having a lot on your plate freshman year...

But the book is not all dark. Humor seeps into it at every turn--and compassion and grace.  Meg tries to navigate college classes, new friendships, and a potential boyfriend, whose reputation is not stellar. This is a book about a college-age girl, so there is swearing, drinking, and a spot or two of making out, but it all is seamlessly part of the enthralling glimpse into a very complicated, very real life readers will get from Long May She Reign.