Reviews

Begin the World Over by Kung Li Sun

eva_e's review

adventurous emotional informative inspiring 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? No

5.0

mamthew42's review

5.0

Begin the World Over is a work of historical fiction that avoids the genre term, advertising itself instead as a counterfactual novel about history as it should have been. Despite that phrasing, the novel is pretty at home with most works of historical fiction I've read. It's impeccably researched and while many of the events aren't true, quite a few of them are. I've read self-professed historical fiction that took much more creative liberty than this book and didn't bother apologizing for it. That said, I have talked a lot with Historian friends about the problem of ethical historical fiction. It's easy for poorly researched or even purposely misleading historical fiction to form the basis for the popular understanding of a specific time, place, person, or culture, so I appreciate Sun's willingness to state up front that people shouldn't allow their book to do that for them.

Most of the characters of the novel are based on real historical figures. James Hemings, the very first French-trained American chef, who was enslaved by Thomas Jefferson and who - I learned yesterday - invented motherfucking macaroni and cheese, is the book's initial protagonist, accidentally joining a pirate crew and opening a restaurant in New Orleans. The pirate captain, Denmark, is another historical figure and protagonist, as is Romaine, a trans prophetess who led a Haitian slave revolt. Every character is an absolute treat, and unlike in most novels with several narrators, I was never disappointed with a shift in perspective; I was just newly excited to see what James or Romaine or Red Eagle was up to. Sun is a legitimately impressive writer, and I was often taken by surprise by the craft in a bit of prose, or the deftness of a piece of character work

The novel's plot essentially takes several real-life uprisings that all occurred in what is now the United States in the 1790s and brings their leaders together, recasting the revolutions as parts of a larger strategic effort. Sun uses this to ask how much improved things might have been had things gone this way, had a US in its infancy fallen to a concerted Black and Indigenous effort to take it down, spearheaded by queer people, but she doesn't give in to the temptation to answer the question he asks. Instead of being presented with a utopia, we're given a glimpse of a promising start to something better.

My only real issue with this novel is I wish it had an author's note at the end. I've come to really appreciate authors' notes in historical fiction as a way to get a feel for the path their research took and the reasons for decisions they made. I honestly think the lack of an author's note here is a missed opportunity to spotlight some of the truth of the uprisings and historical figures central to the novel. Maybe even to include some portraits or historical artistic renderings of the people and events. Especially as much of AK Press does deal in nonfiction, I would have appreciated a short dip into some historical details at the end. Still, the book did spur me to read up on the characters and events myself, so even without an author's note, I can't say it didn't do its job.

nolan_nolano's review

adventurous challenging emotional hopeful inspiring reflective medium-paced

• Plot- or character-driven? Plot
• Strong character development? It's complicated
• Loveable characters? Yes
• Diverse cast of characters? Yes
• Flaws of characters a main focus? No

5.0

emisati's review

adventurous emotional hopeful inspiring mysterious reflective 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? It's complicated

4.5

danielpatrick's review

adventurous emotional hopeful 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? Yes

4.0

shraiya's review

adventurous challenging inspiring fast-paced

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

4.25

transguyrudy's review

adventurous hopeful inspiring reflective 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? Yes

4.75

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

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

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

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