PRISCILLA
Engaging in the Game of Politics, © 2016, 343 pages, Coming-of-Age/Political
ISBN: 978-0-578-17899-8 Paperback, $19.95 & ISBN: 978-1-7322406-2-9 EPUB/MOBI $9.99
Set in the early 1980s, Priscilla: Engaging in the Game of Politics portrays a bright, carefree, enterprising young woman strongly bound to her father—a Methodist minister and consummate politician—about whom she has conflicted feelings. Shortly after she begins her career as an assistant professor of political science at Florida A&M University in Tallahassee, her father mysteriously asks her to relocate closer to home (Prendergast, New York). She contacts an Ohio state senator for whom she performed an internship during her graduate studies at The Ohio State University and with whom she had an affair. The senator offers her a job as his legislative aide. She accepts and relocates to the capital city of Columbus, where she engages in the game of politics of her own volition.
Throughout, the series’ prequel takes a deep look at the forces which made her what she is: her family roots in highly-segregated Mississippi, her upbringing in upstate New York where subtle racism leaves its scars despite her loving father’s protection, a campus date rape that leaves her with unhealed wounds and, a scintillating season as a high-powered legislative aide in a life-altering political scandal.
Priscilla Engaging in the Game of Politics
“Trilogy begins. M.J. Simms-Maddox’s Priscilla dives into politics.” SALISBURY POST
“The author knows the inner workings of state politics, the wily maneuvers, the party bartering, and the importance of rank, experience, and sponsorship. Priscilla survives an affair with her boss, weathering it like a veteran from New York tabloid wars while writing a letter about her former allies that would have destroyed someone else in real life. It makes for good reading that keeps the reader interested.” AFRICAN AMERICAN LITERATURE BOOK CLUB
“A classic bildungsroman. Simms-Maddox demonstrates her knowledge of the game firsthand with great descriptive details and political jargon throughout this thriller.” MARIE LINTON UMEH, Ph.D.
“‘When writing a novel, a writer should create living people; people, not characters. A character is a caricature,’ said Ernest Hemingway. And a living person is precisely what Simms-Maddox has created in her book.” OSIRIS VALLEJO
“I have read many books, both fiction and nonfiction, and all of the authors have had more experience than [Simms-Maddox]. Yet [her] novel eclipses them all. Being [her] first novel, Priscilla demonstrates vocabulary that mesmerizes the reader; I was drawn into the story and couldn’t put the book down. I confess, the graphic description of a daughter seeing her father’s illness and death, tears welled up in my eyes. [She has] the gift of a seasoned writer.” RETIRED POSTAL WORKER, East Orange, New Jersey