Reviews with content warning for Rape - The Free People's Village

The concept of the Free People's Village? Amazing. I love the idea of autonomous zones, especially ones that crop up in protest. Some of the aspects of the Village - including group meals, art builds, and horizontal organization - warmed my leftist heart to see illustrated on the page. I also really appreciated many of the anti-authoritarian & abolitionist sentiments shared by the character of Gestas. He reminded me of people I know & love in real life.

Beyond the aspects mentioned above, though, I did not enjoy this book. I tried to write a thorough review explaining all of the reasons why but I ran into the Instagram character limit. Thus, I present to you a list of qualms:

1. Maddie is irritatingly spineless and naive. She has nearly zero personality beyond being in love & being afraid.

2. Maddie constantly demands the emotional labor of people of color to assuage her fears and extreme naivete.

3. The love interest, Red, is sexy but super toxic. It seemed we were supposed to be rooting for xim & Maddie. I couldn't.

4. The structure of this book is uneven and jumbled. It's a journal but the jumps in time are often abrupt.

5. Everything in this novel is heavy-handed and over-explained. All of part 1, in which the characters are introduced in unnecessarily repetitive detail, could have been eliminated & the story would have been better for it.

6. Relatedly to the above, this is a New Adult story that relies on constantly telling versus showing. I know that Kern has a background in teaching, but I didn't enjoy feeling like one of their students.

7. Parallels & meta nods to our real-world timeline were made. They were cheesy and awkward.

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kleinekita's review against another edition

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challenging hopeful inspiring medium-paced

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

4.0

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roaming_enn's review

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adventurous challenging 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? Yes

4.5

This book tells the story of a queer punk band that gets an eviction notice one day, and they decide to occupy the warehouse that their band plays in. But the occupation turns into something bigger, with more causes for which to fight, and even goes national and international. The POV character is Maddie Ryan, a white cishet young woman that grows up middle-class and finds herself, by chance really, in the middle of the protests and demonstrations because of her circumstances. Through her participation, she learns and grows into a person that is eventually willing to fight for what she believes in.

I loved this book! I saw some reviews on here (the Storygraph) about how people thought all the major characters were unlikeable, and I was a bit worried that I might feel the same way. But I didn't! Yes, they all have flaws that may feel unbearable for some readers. Maddie, for instance, is a white cis woman who never had to deal with racism or transphobia or violence, and so she's clueless about a lot of the things and constantly questioning her motives and actions. I think I related to her a little bit, which is why I didn't find her absolutely unbearable. I feel like her thoughts were very much understandable for someone in her situation.

My favorite character was Red, though, and I'm not quite sure why. Every time xe appears on the page, probably from the very first page, I just wanted to keep reading!

And when I learned of xir fate

, I wanted to curse the author for eternity! Sure, Red was a drunk that when not doing demonstrations just wanted to numb xirself by getting blackout drunk or doing drugs. And that just made me worried for xim... For me, it was seeing someone being in such emotional turmoil that they would harm themself that made me connect with xim.

I'm not a big romance reader, especially where books that aren't advertised as being romance but where a romance plays a major role in the story. But I loved Maddie's and Red's relationship, and I rooted for them from the beginning.

A poignant metaphor in the end of the book is used by Shayna to describe huge demonstrations vs. the small actions that demonstrators must take everyday. One of the participants asked what the point of their weekly meetings was if only 6 of them attended. Shayna compares the large demonstrations to a mushroom, and the weekly meetings as the mycelium of the mushroom, the things underground that feed and nurture the mushroom. The mushroom can then shoot spores that spread throughout the landscape to give birth to even more mushrooms. Things like the weekly meetings serve to nurture the global need for change, so that once a large demonstration is bound to happen, people will be ready. It's such a good metaphor to describe how large protests can happen seemingly out of nowhere, almost organically, but it is due in part to the everyday work done behind the scenes.

So much of the book is so applicable today. And this is why everyone should be reading it. Anyway, thanks for coming to my rambling TED talk.

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mikk16's review

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medium-paced

4.25

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hmknerr's review

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5.0

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bobbi's review

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challenging reflective slow-paced

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

3.5

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cynicalplankton's review

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adventurous hopeful tense medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Diverse cast of characters? Yes

4.0

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rpompom's review against another edition

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challenging dark emotional hopeful sad medium-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? Yes

4.25

I was looking forward to this book and feel like it did inspire complex thought and good discussions with others. I have not seen many books with a narrator sitting with shame, guilt, desire to change and support liberation while wrestling with their privilege as explicitly. I did feel like the narrator felt a bit young (than their supposed age) and a bit flat in their exploration, sitting with so much white guilt. I did enjoy that this was not a utopian novel - it sat within an alternate timeline of dystopia and wrestled with things we are currently fighting as well.

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