Too Early to Know Who's Winning
by Karla Huebner
Description
Jacobine Flaa and her increasingly unrealistic friend Cinda are approaching retirement in the Midwest in the age of Trump and the climate crisis. Both want to move back to the western US, but can they afford the housing prices there?
Jacobine, a historian specializing in immigration, combines teaching and museum work at a university and misses her California friends; Cinda, an art historian employed less than happy at a small museum, wants a more outdoorsy life and keeps applying for jobs in places she’d rather live.
The novel opens on Election Day 2016 when the two women meet for dinner with a third friend. When Trump captures the necessary electoral votes, Jacobine attends many protests, while Cinda, though sharing her politics, is no activist.
Jacobine struggles with health worries and the loss of friends and loved ones to cancer, heart attack, and suicide. What's more, over time, Cinda’s sometimes crazy plans and peculiar expectations prompt Jacobine to rethink their friendship.
Jacobine must confront questions of aging, death, and renewal in her effort to regain a vibrant life. How will she pull herself forward as she turns sixty in the third year of the Trump presidency?

The book hit home on how bad the win for Trump was for people. Depression, anger, marches, and just in how he made people HATE. It was a clear picture of how America changed and not for the good. At times, it seem it was more of a daily blog instead of what it felt it was. Yet, it dared share light on the truth and how I felt, and how he needed to be voted out .

Jacobine - and what a great name that is - is fast approaching sixty when Trump is elected President of the United States. Too Early to know who’s winning follows her life for the following year, attending anti-Trump rallies, worrying about the state of the world, attending funerals, pre-retirement workshops and medical appointments, while trying to come to grips with fast approaching old age and changing friendships. In all honesty, I’m not too sure what the point of the novel was. It is singularly lacking in narrative arc - but perhaps that is the point, once one gets back one twenties and thirties, the narrative arc somehow flattens out? It is possible that American readers will feel differently, but from my European lenses, the lamentations about the state of America and Trump’s stupidity somehow were not interesting. Still, a three star because I very much liked Jacobine, the writing is good and gently funny and any book that chooses a close to sixty, single woman as its heroin has my vote.