“Plum’s explosive and hilarious new political novel forges a vision of our own moment in American history that will go far in explaining the insanity of now to the future. State Champ’s solitary, howling voice slashes deep down into America’s naked, troubled heart. A vivid, mind-blowing and soulful book.” ROBIN McLEAN
“An acrobatic, harrowing marathon of cut-to-the-quick prose, with a narrator who’s ferocious, funny, and wise. State Champ churns with tremendous urgency that would be, and will be, vital in any era. Hilary Plum is a breathtaking talent.” HENRY HOKE
“Oh, this voice! Ferocious, hilarious, slippery, wise—I couldn’t stop listening. Hilary Plum is one of my favorite writers working today because her curiosity about injustice and liberation is so relentless, so tender, and so alert to the fact that every single one of us is implicated in the struggle.” LENI ZUMAS
“Where's the red line, sheeple? State Champ knows. A defiant punk voice, fucked up and bristling from defeats, growls her barbed protest song, so vivid and direct you can't tell when its ragged refusals transform into the limpid melodic rill of exit music and fight song. Hilary Plum has composed an athletic, poised, and complex fury, knowing of the body and leavened with foils, to remind us how to take a stand.” EUGENE LIM
“State Champ comes at you with a furious and feral intelligence, ninja slacker wit, and a reckless hope that blasts through the dim fug of contemporary politics. Hilary Plum's latest novel is a hardcore, pitch-perfect, breakout banger with a heart as big as the world, from one of our finest unsung talents. Compulsively readable.” ROY SCRANTON
“Hilary Plum’s State Champ is somehow simultaneously a searing portrait of political & personal desperation, a deep anti-hagiographical investigation into how to be a person in our contemporary fascist state, and a relentlessly funny bildungsroman for the rest of us. Every time I put this book down briefly, someone else picked it up and refused to give it back until they finished, because once you start, you can’t stop. You’re next.” ANDREA LAWLOR
Bloomsbury
May 2025
Order here
Jezebel's June 2025 Book Club pick, review by Nora Biette-Timmons here
Selected for May 2025 Indie Next list
Excerpt in the Cleveland Review of Books
Interview on Page Count by Laura Maylene Walter
Review in Publishers Weekly
Review in The Cut by Emma Alpern
Review in the New York Times by Sanjena Sathian
Review in Shelf Awareness by Samantha Zaboski
A high-school state champion runner turned college dropout, Angela is working as a receptionist at an abortion clinic when a “heartbeat law” criminalizes most abortions statewide. In the ensuing upheaval, her boss is arrested for providing illegal procedures and the clinic is shut down.
Angela has never been either an activist or a model employee. But she gets why her boss didn't follow the rules. She decides to go on a hunger strike in the boarded-up clinic, to protest her boss's arrest and everything that's been lost. She'll draw on her skillset: the masochistic discipline of a runner, a history of self-destructive behavior, and a willingness to sleep on exam room tables (whose hygienic paper she uses as her diary).
Angela's protest is solitary, enraged, and a little messy, but it mobilizes a group of people around her-an ex who's a local journalist looking for a good story, the everyday people the clinic once served, and most especially a formidable anti-abortion activist named Janine.
Lucid, strange, and deeply metal, State Champ cuts through the political rhetoric to explore the relationship between bodily autonomy and real freedom. Angela's story is about what abortion access means day-to-day and how much we are-in ways that can transform us-responsible for one another.
*
“This book sunk its teeth into me. I don't totally know how to articulate it, but I want everyone to read it. STATE CHAMP is the story of an unlikely activist - a former running champion who goes on a one-woman hunger strike after the doctor who runs the abortion clinic she works at is arrested for continuing to provide care to women in need. Adrift, Plum's writing is like a sock to the face when you're a little buzzed - stark, weirdly funny, guaranteed to shock you out of complacency. As the narrator starts to succumb to her hunger, the prose grows more surreal and stilted, letting us into her hard shell bit by bit, and illuminating the path that led her here. The book also manages to give page time to characters on all sides of the reproductive rights conversation (including a villain that feels ripped from headlines) , but never feels preachy or allegorical. Just real people, their real lives, and the real accumulation of a hundred small moments of grief that might turn someone into an ambivalent martyr. Affecting, original, and one I'll be thinking about for a long time.”
Rachel Knox, Tombolo Books, St. Petersburg, FL
“This gloriously devastating novel grabbed me by the throat and never let go. Timely and prescient, this issue-driven story is grounded in the specificity of a hard-core narrator whose personal losses in life are measured against her one big win as high school state long distance running champ. The reader is brought relentlessly along when the narrator stages a hunger strike to draw attention to the cruelty of restrictive abortion laws and the imprisonment of the doctor whose example of sacrifice inspires her. Empathetic, enraging, and gloriously written, Hilary Plum has given us a perceptive portrait of our dystopian present.”
Kim van Alkemade, Northshire Saratoga, Saratoga Springs, NY
“Short, blunt, prickly, and mesmerizing.”
Laura Cummings, White Birch Books, North Conway, NH
“In the wake of post-Dobbs restrictions, the abortion clinic where Angela works as a receptionist is shut down and her boss arrested and jailed. Angela, prickly, chaotic, and wounded, decides to protest by going on a solitary hunger strike using the discipline she's earned from her days as a high-school State Champion runner. She documents the days of her strike by keeping a running diary on the sterile exam table paper. As her protest wears on and she becomes weaker, Angela's acerbic, unflinchingly honest voice becomes more fragmented and hallucinatory. Her insights about bodily autonomy and choice, however, remain sharp and incisive. This novel is brutal, raw, and often very funny. Not always an easy read, but a riveting one and deserving of a wide audience.”
Debra Ginsberg, DIESEL, A Bookstore, Santa Monica, CA
“Deft, fluid, and voice-y, STATE CHAMP coalesces the individual experience with the collective and gets to the very human matter of life: morality, regret, love, knowledge, and the unavoidable viscera. Former high school running State Champ and abortion clinic receptionist, Angela goes on a hunger strike to protest her boss's arrest as the "heartbeat law" takes into effect. An important read for the current times!”
Shelby Newsome, Curious Iguana, Frederick, MD
“Hilary Plum's new novel is a lacerating indictment of the repeal of Roe v. Wade. Angela is a women’s health clinic receptionist with a troubled past. When one of the clinic’s doctors is arrested for providing abortions post-Dobbs, Angela goes on a hunger strike in a desperate attempt to have her freed. The book, written in the form of a diary, shows a woman disintegrating physically, mentally, and emotionally. The angry, sometimes darkly funny prose hits the reader like shards of shattered glass. A timely and important book.”
Grace Harper, Mac's Backs, Cleveland Heights, OH
“Hilary Plum should have a huge breakthrough with State Champ. It has all the elements of a potential cult classic, but hopefully the audience for this superb novel will transcend that status. I am absolutely awe struck by the realism and strength of her writing voice. She forcefully deals with the theft of individual female autonomy with brilliant insight and a through the lens of a perfectly constructed protagonist. This is a hardcore, gut punch of a novel that left me astounded and desperate to read more prose from this gifted author.”
Shane Grebel, Watermark Books & Café, Wichita, KS
“Spoiler Alert! State Champ is devastating! The clinic has been closed, boarded up. Dr. M has been arrested, tried and found guilty. Staff have dispersed. Current and future patients are abandoned. State Champ is courageous! Former high school running champion - Angela - is not leaving. She has taken up residence in her former work site, and has begun her own one-person hunger strike marathon. State Champ is stark! Reality is never as lovely as we would like it to be. In fact, it can be downright depressing and ugly. If you factor in bodily functions, cockroaches, odors and a less-than-helpful police officer, it can become a hygienic nightmare. State Champ is brilliant! Stream-of-consciousness journaling, texting to the outside world and occasional in-person conversations lay the groundwork for this moving, atmospheric story about an issue on everyone's mind. Is this about abortion? Health care? Freedom? Perhaps "all of the above." State Champ is intelligent! These are not just characters. Each of the participants in the author's telling of her story represents a different viewpoint regarding this issue. That they can come together in an effort to help one lone, self-choosing activist is remarkable. I am blown away by the intricate dedication to Truth imbedded in State Champ. It purrs, it growls, it flashes tooth and claw, but it's forever memorable. I will NEVER forget this book!”
Linda Bond, Auntie’s Bookstore, Spokane, WA
“You do not read State Champ so much as let it move through you. A must for readers of Marcy Dermansky and Emma Cline, it is an epiphanic novel that will pull readers in with a sneaky, delightfully perverted tone before giving way to a wildly moving, proudly subversive tale. You won't find another novel this scrappy, acerbic, or electrifying any time soon.”
Wesley Minter, Third Place Books, Lake Forest Park, WA
“An acrobatic, harrowing marathon of cut-to-the-quick prose, with a narrator who’s ferocious, funny, and wise. State Champ churns with tremendous urgency that would be, and will be, vital in any era. Hilary Plum is a breathtaking talent.” HENRY HOKE
“Oh, this voice! Ferocious, hilarious, slippery, wise—I couldn’t stop listening. Hilary Plum is one of my favorite writers working today because her curiosity about injustice and liberation is so relentless, so tender, and so alert to the fact that every single one of us is implicated in the struggle.” LENI ZUMAS
“Where's the red line, sheeple? State Champ knows. A defiant punk voice, fucked up and bristling from defeats, growls her barbed protest song, so vivid and direct you can't tell when its ragged refusals transform into the limpid melodic rill of exit music and fight song. Hilary Plum has composed an athletic, poised, and complex fury, knowing of the body and leavened with foils, to remind us how to take a stand.” EUGENE LIM
“State Champ comes at you with a furious and feral intelligence, ninja slacker wit, and a reckless hope that blasts through the dim fug of contemporary politics. Hilary Plum's latest novel is a hardcore, pitch-perfect, breakout banger with a heart as big as the world, from one of our finest unsung talents. Compulsively readable.” ROY SCRANTON
“Hilary Plum’s State Champ is somehow simultaneously a searing portrait of political & personal desperation, a deep anti-hagiographical investigation into how to be a person in our contemporary fascist state, and a relentlessly funny bildungsroman for the rest of us. Every time I put this book down briefly, someone else picked it up and refused to give it back until they finished, because once you start, you can’t stop. You’re next.” ANDREA LAWLOR
Bloomsbury
May 2025
Order here
Jezebel's June 2025 Book Club pick, review by Nora Biette-Timmons here
Selected for May 2025 Indie Next list
Excerpt in the Cleveland Review of Books
Interview on Page Count by Laura Maylene Walter
Review in Publishers Weekly
Review in The Cut by Emma Alpern
Review in the New York Times by Sanjena Sathian
Review in Shelf Awareness by Samantha Zaboski
A high-school state champion runner turned college dropout, Angela is working as a receptionist at an abortion clinic when a “heartbeat law” criminalizes most abortions statewide. In the ensuing upheaval, her boss is arrested for providing illegal procedures and the clinic is shut down.
Angela has never been either an activist or a model employee. But she gets why her boss didn't follow the rules. She decides to go on a hunger strike in the boarded-up clinic, to protest her boss's arrest and everything that's been lost. She'll draw on her skillset: the masochistic discipline of a runner, a history of self-destructive behavior, and a willingness to sleep on exam room tables (whose hygienic paper she uses as her diary).
Angela's protest is solitary, enraged, and a little messy, but it mobilizes a group of people around her-an ex who's a local journalist looking for a good story, the everyday people the clinic once served, and most especially a formidable anti-abortion activist named Janine.
Lucid, strange, and deeply metal, State Champ cuts through the political rhetoric to explore the relationship between bodily autonomy and real freedom. Angela's story is about what abortion access means day-to-day and how much we are-in ways that can transform us-responsible for one another.
*
“This book sunk its teeth into me. I don't totally know how to articulate it, but I want everyone to read it. STATE CHAMP is the story of an unlikely activist - a former running champion who goes on a one-woman hunger strike after the doctor who runs the abortion clinic she works at is arrested for continuing to provide care to women in need. Adrift, Plum's writing is like a sock to the face when you're a little buzzed - stark, weirdly funny, guaranteed to shock you out of complacency. As the narrator starts to succumb to her hunger, the prose grows more surreal and stilted, letting us into her hard shell bit by bit, and illuminating the path that led her here. The book also manages to give page time to characters on all sides of the reproductive rights conversation (including a villain that feels ripped from headlines) , but never feels preachy or allegorical. Just real people, their real lives, and the real accumulation of a hundred small moments of grief that might turn someone into an ambivalent martyr. Affecting, original, and one I'll be thinking about for a long time.”
Rachel Knox, Tombolo Books, St. Petersburg, FL
“This gloriously devastating novel grabbed me by the throat and never let go. Timely and prescient, this issue-driven story is grounded in the specificity of a hard-core narrator whose personal losses in life are measured against her one big win as high school state long distance running champ. The reader is brought relentlessly along when the narrator stages a hunger strike to draw attention to the cruelty of restrictive abortion laws and the imprisonment of the doctor whose example of sacrifice inspires her. Empathetic, enraging, and gloriously written, Hilary Plum has given us a perceptive portrait of our dystopian present.”
Kim van Alkemade, Northshire Saratoga, Saratoga Springs, NY
“Short, blunt, prickly, and mesmerizing.”
Laura Cummings, White Birch Books, North Conway, NH
“In the wake of post-Dobbs restrictions, the abortion clinic where Angela works as a receptionist is shut down and her boss arrested and jailed. Angela, prickly, chaotic, and wounded, decides to protest by going on a solitary hunger strike using the discipline she's earned from her days as a high-school State Champion runner. She documents the days of her strike by keeping a running diary on the sterile exam table paper. As her protest wears on and she becomes weaker, Angela's acerbic, unflinchingly honest voice becomes more fragmented and hallucinatory. Her insights about bodily autonomy and choice, however, remain sharp and incisive. This novel is brutal, raw, and often very funny. Not always an easy read, but a riveting one and deserving of a wide audience.”
Debra Ginsberg, DIESEL, A Bookstore, Santa Monica, CA
“Deft, fluid, and voice-y, STATE CHAMP coalesces the individual experience with the collective and gets to the very human matter of life: morality, regret, love, knowledge, and the unavoidable viscera. Former high school running State Champ and abortion clinic receptionist, Angela goes on a hunger strike to protest her boss's arrest as the "heartbeat law" takes into effect. An important read for the current times!”
Shelby Newsome, Curious Iguana, Frederick, MD
“Hilary Plum's new novel is a lacerating indictment of the repeal of Roe v. Wade. Angela is a women’s health clinic receptionist with a troubled past. When one of the clinic’s doctors is arrested for providing abortions post-Dobbs, Angela goes on a hunger strike in a desperate attempt to have her freed. The book, written in the form of a diary, shows a woman disintegrating physically, mentally, and emotionally. The angry, sometimes darkly funny prose hits the reader like shards of shattered glass. A timely and important book.”
Grace Harper, Mac's Backs, Cleveland Heights, OH
“Hilary Plum should have a huge breakthrough with State Champ. It has all the elements of a potential cult classic, but hopefully the audience for this superb novel will transcend that status. I am absolutely awe struck by the realism and strength of her writing voice. She forcefully deals with the theft of individual female autonomy with brilliant insight and a through the lens of a perfectly constructed protagonist. This is a hardcore, gut punch of a novel that left me astounded and desperate to read more prose from this gifted author.”
Shane Grebel, Watermark Books & Café, Wichita, KS
“Spoiler Alert! State Champ is devastating! The clinic has been closed, boarded up. Dr. M has been arrested, tried and found guilty. Staff have dispersed. Current and future patients are abandoned. State Champ is courageous! Former high school running champion - Angela - is not leaving. She has taken up residence in her former work site, and has begun her own one-person hunger strike marathon. State Champ is stark! Reality is never as lovely as we would like it to be. In fact, it can be downright depressing and ugly. If you factor in bodily functions, cockroaches, odors and a less-than-helpful police officer, it can become a hygienic nightmare. State Champ is brilliant! Stream-of-consciousness journaling, texting to the outside world and occasional in-person conversations lay the groundwork for this moving, atmospheric story about an issue on everyone's mind. Is this about abortion? Health care? Freedom? Perhaps "all of the above." State Champ is intelligent! These are not just characters. Each of the participants in the author's telling of her story represents a different viewpoint regarding this issue. That they can come together in an effort to help one lone, self-choosing activist is remarkable. I am blown away by the intricate dedication to Truth imbedded in State Champ. It purrs, it growls, it flashes tooth and claw, but it's forever memorable. I will NEVER forget this book!”
Linda Bond, Auntie’s Bookstore, Spokane, WA
“You do not read State Champ so much as let it move through you. A must for readers of Marcy Dermansky and Emma Cline, it is an epiphanic novel that will pull readers in with a sneaky, delightfully perverted tone before giving way to a wildly moving, proudly subversive tale. You won't find another novel this scrappy, acerbic, or electrifying any time soon.”
Wesley Minter, Third Place Books, Lake Forest Park, WA