Sammy's Hill. Kristin Gore. New York: Miramax Books, 2004.
| Kristin Gore, the daughter and granddaughter of U.S. senators, combined experience gained as a television comedy writer with her D.C. background to produce a lighthearted tale of romance and public policy. Samantha “Sammy” Joyce is a twenty-six-year-old health-care analyst for an Ohio senator running for vice president. Quirky and idealistic, Sammy wants her boss to be elected and hopes to find true love. But the path to achieving these wishes is not smooth as Sammy wrestles with political complications, romantic entanglements, and her own accident-prone nature. Gore revisits many of these characters in a sequel, Sammy’s House.
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Two Moons. Thomas Mallon. New York: Pantheon Books, 2000.
| Roscoe Conkling, who represented New York in the U.S. Senate from 1867 to 1881, controlled a vast patronage machine and was contemptuous of efforts at civil service reform. He seems unlikely to appear in a romantic novel but does just that in this story of Cynthia May, a Civil War widow who lands a job at the U.S. Naval Observatory, and Hugh Allison, an astronomer. Set in 1877, the year the moons of Mars were discovered, the novel includes other real-life figures as Blanche Kelso Bruce, the first African American to serve a full term in the Senate. Thomas Mallon has also written about the Senate in some of his other historical novels; his most recent work, Fellow Travelers, focuses on the McCarthy era.
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The Capitol Hill in Fiction bibliography lists more novels about the Senate, House, and Capitol Hill.
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