Thank you GetRedPrBooks & She Writes Press #partner, for the advanced copy of The Third Way in exchange for this feature.
Today, I’m happy to be featuring this book, which published last week. Please see what others have said about the book and learn the inspiration behind the book.
Publisher: She Writes Press
Published: August 23, 2022
Summary:
A college student with a fear of public speaking finds herself leading a movement to abolish corporations, pushed to the forefront by a mysterious law student with a past.
After losing her college scholarship, Arden Firth—with the help of Justin Kirish, a law student with a mysterious past—becomes the reluctant leader of a movement to ban corporations. South Dakota Ballot Initiative 99 is Arden’s last hope to save her grandmother’s farm from foreclosure; but as the movement grows, shadowy forces conspire to quash it, and Arden sees “99” begin to spiral out of her control.
A novel charting the intersection between idealism, extremism, and forgiveness, fans of Barbara Kingsolver and Margaret Atwood will love The Third Way—the story of a young woman struggling with her own demons while trying to articulate a vision that could change the world.
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PRAISE FOR THE THIRD WAY:
“A playbook for how to seed a revolution, The Third Way is thought-provoking, illuminating, and inspiring. It captivated me from page one and left me thinking meaningful social change is possible. Arden is my favorite kind of protagonist: passionate, determined, and brave enough to take on the ‘C’ word (yes, capitalism).”
—Carrie Firestone, author of The Unlikelies and Dress Coded and community organizer of ForwardCT
“In this impressive first novel, Aimee Hoben provides a clear-eyed, propulsive, and morally complex look at the systems that vie to hold our country a corporate hostage. The Third Way’s Arden Firth is as winning and knowable a character as I’ve encountered in some time. This is such a bold debut.”
—Daniel Torday, author of Boomer1 and The Last Flight of Poxl West
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Aimee Hoben is a lawyer and writer who lives in Connecticut, with her husband, two kids and two dogs. She has worked as a land conservation lawyer and a town attorney, as well as at the historic fire insurance company where Wallace Stevens wrote poems as he walked to work. She studied English literature at the University of Colorado, and law at the University of Connecticut.
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BEHIND THE BOOK
LEARN MORE ABOUT THE THIRD WAY
What inspired THE THIRD WAY?
The Third Way emerged in 2017, when I was trying to write a different book. The idea of a corporation bad, and the characters who would advocate for it, edged their way in. Personally, I was struggling with how to be a leader at my job in a Fortune 500 corporate Law Department and thinking about women’s leadership – how it is perceived in the workforce and in politics, and why it felt so uncomfortable to me. I was also thinking about the role of work in my life, sometimes resenting the obligations and compromises of adulthood. Much of Arden’s experience is born of my own.
As an attorney, I was working on corporate mergers and divisions, using those state laws that create and govern corporate structure and formation. This got me to thinking, how can the federal constitution protect corporations’ free speech, supposedly inherent to the rights of “persons,” if corporations rise and fall under state law? Would it be possible, I started to wonder, to abolish corporations in a particular state through a ballot initiative? Could voters band together and decide that they’d had enough?
Why South Dakota?
South Dakota was the perfect setting for my book, as the first state in the union to pass a voter-initiative process in the 1800s. In the novel, Arden is inspired by her grandmother’s volunteering in her youth on the ballot campaign for anti-corporate farming laws, which South Dakota voters passed in the 1970s to protect family farms and prohibit corporations from owning agricultural land.
Conversely, South Dakota has some of the most pro-corporation banking laws in the country and transformed the credit card industry in the 1980s by lifting limits on interest that could be charged, paving the way for predatory lending and enticing banks to relocate to Sioux Falls. And lastly, while a corporation ban in pure fiction, parts of the story are rooted in real life events. South Dakota was the scene of a dramatic anti-corruption ballot initiative passed by voters in the 2016 elections, only to be repealed in a midnight session by the very state legislature that voters sought to curtail. The Dakotas are also home to the Standing Rock Sioux, who made headlines in 2016 for their historic resistance to the Dakota Access Pipeline. In my book, I wanted to empower those indigenous activists who stood up against the DAP, giving them the votes to tip the scales on the ballot initiative.
