Reviews

This book was a delight to read. I absolutely loved it. Its not often that you come across a book about revolution that feels imbued with queer chaos in the way that this one does, and it made it incredibly hard to put down every night! I loved all the characters - Red Eagle, James and Romaine being my favourites. And Denmark. And Mary.

I really needed a book about the success of revolutions and what it takes to pull one off - having started to falter a little bit and pass into despair at the state of the world, I feel energised to come back fighting for justice and freedom. I know that this book will be one that I revisit when I need to reassert my faith that change is coming.

kxiong5's review against another edition

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adventurous challenging hopeful inspiring tense medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? No

4.25

So…I read the first quarter of this book in snatches on commutes, etc. and then the last three quarters of this book in one furious night after getting back from Niagara Falls and from St. Catherine’s in Canada, which either fits or reinforced my sense of the book’s pacing: very slow at the beginning as we accumulate characters and backstory, and then very very fast as the revolution begins.

Like The Free People’s Village, James starts as an entry point to revolution (as the uninitiated and uncertain revolutionary-by-circumstance, aka he got blackout drunk after meeting a very charismatic Denmark Vesey and snuck onto Vesey’s ship). But (maybe because he’s not white and white guilt is not at all focal in this book, thank god), he doesn’t dither in ways that get annoying and self-serving the way Maddie’s narrative in The Free People’s Village often does: He has serious concerns about his enslaved family members being sold as punishment for his escape, he has real career aspirations for himself and wants to make a name for himself as a chef, he has actual leadership skills in his ability to command a kitchen and work as a convener around that food (e.g. when he’s wheedling information about revolution out of folks like Vesey and Romaine, at first for purely gay reasons (lol Denmark)), and ultimately he chooses the path of revolution without hesitating after he’s made his choice. In any case, once he’s done being the entry point to the narrative, like a readerly warmup to the tactics of revolution, it turns into a multivocal narrative with even more interesting characters (Romaine, Mary, Red Eagle in particular, but to a lesser extent Denmark Vesey as well) with complex backstories and internal conflicts that get revealed in somehow totally different ways. (The kinds of internal conflicts they face also feel like a way of saying, you can have very different orientations towards action and your world and work very well together, e.g. Mary’s single-minded will to action against Andrew Jackson in the wake of her sister’s sale vs. Red Eagle’s struggle to inherit a (slightly gendered) matriarchal mantle his mother needs him to take on vs. Romaine’s having led and witnessed the price of failed revolution—they debate things furiously but ultimately put their egos aside and think of the lives at stake and reach consensus fast enough to keep their army agile and still manage to bring everyone with them in a way I’m realizing is a foundational aspect of revolutionary writing: you need to bring everyone with you into the future. You don’t break ranks and you don’t leave anyone behind.

In some ways, I think this is a more successful way of getting at the tactics and community of revolution, while The Free People’s Village is more about the ambivalence of trying to do good as an individual within a divided community and find a political education in the whirlpool of modern disruptions and violence, which operates at a scale that the revolutionaries in Begin the World Over cannot match (muskets and machine guns require very different tactics // cannot operate a battlefield in the same way in the slightest). The Free People’s Village gets more at why things are hard today—scale-wise, political environment-wise, and in terms of individual egos playing a significant role in how people act around each other and why—and Begin the World Over works more so in terms of what things could be possible, if chosen, if everyone is willing to face up to violence and work together and not be tied to what the world should look like after the revolution while fighting the revolution itself (I mean, other than the obvious: people cannot be property, land cannot be property, you cannot bargain with people who are beholden to those ideas, and you cannot abandon your political allies).

I’d love to look more into this author’s process of researching this book & write about this in conjunction with The Free People’s Village and Everything for Everyone (this book just cemented my need to write about these together—and talk about what it means to write an alternate history of the past, present, and future, and what you can do about narratives as such), and of course will need to reread pieces of this in the process. Overall, though: this book was thoroughly cool, if a little slow at the start, and reads like a heist novel (like if I’d actually enjoyed Six of Crows / if Six of Crows actually had a sense of mission and purpose that wasn’t tied to a full-on other series, but also more narratively experimental and interesting as well).

A few scattered notes I made while reading:

Mai’s discussion of an economic replacement for the slave trade
food at the heart of revolution (the Denmark x James romance as the driver of these didactic discussions of revolutionary tactics and the ways in which you can disagree fundamentally about them is interesting)
Romaine’s experiences of faith…a willingness to read the signs from herons to people
How to use language this way in the real world? what of a world where language is losing its trust (given machine learning and language models?)
The value of faith and recognizing when something is truly beginning to crumble…you need to write. Write like your mind’s on fire. This was the purpose of everything in your life.
note moments of significance in the novel and what they signify to you—in each of these characters’ narratives (the refusal that Red Eagle learns)
Show and deception / subterfuge as a necessary part of revolution**
But also speed and flexibility—the ability to move quickly and as one with surprise and nimbleness —> and a willingness to give up all of what you think you have to chase down something you don’t know will happen (in for a penny, in for a pound // if you have very little to carry with you, you’re less afraid of losing it)
And that Andrew Jackson’s downfall is his hesitance to attack what he sees as his own property!!! That hesitation in the need to protect property—this is what is powerful. This is what holds him back.
Read these novels quickly and study them after…!! As a reader you cannot hesitate and the writers need to keep it that way (**interesting: think about what pacing does to these novels conceptually)
The necessity of violence // and how violence operates on different scales (the easier more manageable violence of Begin the World Over vs that of The Free People’s Village)…how do you break through that if not via a world collapse? (NYC Commune?)
could do a general read / synthesis of these pieces quickly and delve into key moments / themes in each as bulleted sections
Speed >> fast and slow work >> fast paced writing // writing with urgency vs. the slow sensorium of chemical time

jumokemt's review

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adventurous emotional hopeful reflective fast-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated

4.25

Didactic but remains very compelling b/c of the alternate possibilities that it portrays.

zhollows's review

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adventurous hopeful informative inspiring tense fast-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated

4.75

11corvus11's review

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5.0

Kung Li Sun's Begin the World Over is described as a "counterfactual" novel about the insurrection that resulted in the creation of Haiti. I am not a scholar of rebellions enacted by enslaved people throughout USA history, but I am interested in their stories, especially those that so often go untold. I am not sure if it's common to be ignorant about this particular uprising or not, but I was. Since the book is described as "counterfactual," I assumed initially to believe that the story was purely fiction. However, once I started the book, I realized just how much of it was true. The exact minute events and conversations may not be, but the people are very real. Sun tells us as much when they introduce the book, stating: "Characters are, by and large, real people, acting within the bounds of available evidence."

Knowing this, I approached the story as a historical fiction. Yet, as it went along, I still found myself fascinated and surprised by the extremely interesting characters. I eventually started googling them to figure out what parts were real and a hell of a lot of what occurred in this book was recorded throughout history. In particular, I was very excited by the fact that we meet multiple characters who transcend the bounds of gender conformity and heterosexuality. Romaine was the first character I ended up googling, when she is described as being born male but adopting the identity of a woman through inspiration and dedication to the virgin Mary. To call her a trans woman would be making assumptions about this interesting presentation that may be something more complicated and or fantastical, hence my language in the previous sentence. There is also some brief but passionate gay male action going on that I could not find evidence for in my very brief googling. It made sense nonetheless due to assumptions made historically about James Hemings' "fluid" sexuality.

These things among many other are what made this rebellion story stand out to me. Of course, LGBTQ folks have always existed, but they are often erased in these histories or at least these parts of their lives are. We also meet a great many maroons sharing space with Creek indigenous people. There is discussion about divisions among the indigenous between those like Red Eagle and Sehoy who will do anything they can to cooperate with and protect liberated slaves and those who would turn them in or worse in exchange for protection of their tribe from white slavers. This is also a real collaboration that happened throughout many revolutions and also in day to day life- maroons and indigenous people cooperating and living together on the margins of colonized and stolen land.

The story itself is exciting. I sometimes have trouble getting into period pieces and historical fiction simply because it's not my favorite type of fiction, but this book drew me in quite early. Sun manages to navigate the stories of many characters and their histories in ways that are both expansive and easy to follow. I felt as if I was along for the ride. I am keeping this vague to avoid spoilers, but I will say that, from what I gathered in my brief searches, the arc that the author chose to give James Hemings is the one that diverges most from recorded history. James Hemings met a tragic and lonely end in real life and this story gives his legacy redemption and a chance at a different timeline. I almost wish I had not looked him up, but at the same time, find the way his story was rewritten for him to be quite beautiful.

This is Kung Li Sun's first novel and I would definitely read something from them again. It was exciting, creative, engaging, and straight up fun at times despite taking place in such a torturous era full of horrific histories. It is an excellent reminder of what people can achieve together even in the most oppressive circumstances. I also really love the cover design. It combines destruction and liberation in a way that does the story justice.

This was also posted to my blog.

madimomreads's review

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adventurous challenging hopeful fast-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated

5.0

librosyvaleria's review

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adventurous challenging dark emotional inspiring reflective medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Plot
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? Yes

5.0

An undoing of colonial history. A what if story that captures your imagination and explores the gritty details of an alternative version of US history where Black and Indigenous people align to undo the early days of the US empire.

10/10 would read again.

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