Too Early to Know Who's Winning

Jacobine Flaa and her increasingly unrealistic friend Cinda are approaching retirement in the Midwest in the age of Trump and 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 happily 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?

Karla Huebner has lived on a boat and worked in factories, offices, theater, publishing, oil refineries, private investigation, and adolescent drug rehab; she eventually taught Art History at Wright State University in Dayton, Ohio. Her short fiction has appeared in such places as the Northwest Review, Colorado State Review, Magic Realism, Fantasy Macabre, Weave, and Opossum, and her collection Heartwood was a finalist for the 2020 Raz-Shumaker award. Her books include the novel In Search of the Magic Theater (Regal House) and the prize-winning study Magnetic Woman: Toyen and the Surrealist Erotic (University of Pittsburgh Press). Like Cinda and Jacobine, she enjoys hiking, biking, and canoeing.