A review by bookishmillennial
The Free People's Village by Sim Kern

adventurous challenging dark emotional hopeful inspiring reflective sad tense medium-paced
  • Plot- or character-driven? A mix
  • Strong character development? Yes
  • Loveable characters? It's complicated
  • Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Disclaimer if you’ve read other reviews by me and are noticing a pattern: You’re correct that I don’t really give starred reviews because I don’t like leaving them. Most often, I will only leave them if I vehemently despised a book.I enjoy most books for what they are, & I extract lessons from them all.

Everyone’s reading experiences are subjective, so I hope my reviews provide enough information to let you know if a book is for you or not, regardless if I add stars or not. Find me on Instagram: @bookish.millennial or tiktok: @bookishmillennial

premise:
  • dystopian adult science fiction, set in an alternate 2020 where Al Gore won the Presidential Election, and blows full steam ahead to the war on climate change, charging a carbon tax for almost everything 
  • first-person perspective of Maddie
  • Maddie has left behind a toxic, abusive marriage to a Catholic man and is reckoning with and questioning her religious identity now too 
  • She works as an English teacher during the day, and goes to a punk space called The Lab at nights
  • Maddie joins a band, Bunny Bloodlust, meets new people (Red, Gestas, Fish), and begins to examine her own privilege and complacency in white supremacy  
  • She joins a Black-led movement/occupation protest to save the Eighth Ward, the primarily Black neighborhood that the Lab is in 
  • Maddie goes from extremely religious (as a way to rebel from her parents surprisingly) to being part of an anarchistic revolution, and unpacking her place in the world! 
  • themes and topics covered: race, religion/shame, white saviorism, gender, sexual orientation, climate change, drug abuse, gentrification
  • check the content warnings I've noted below! 

thoughts:
Maddie was a great main character to follow! She was representative of white saviorism, white guilt and white liberalism all in one, yet Sim still fleshed Maddie out, and let her make mistakes (like it was extremely cringe sometimes hahaha), take accountability for them, and try to do better in the future. I think more people need to get comfortable with being uncomfortable, with knowing they are going to fuck up, and practicing taking accountability in saying "I didn't know that" or "I should have known better, and I will be more mindful in the future".

Maddie's path to becoming an ally and fighting for justice is full of relatable conversations with her new found family, and I think most people will feel seen by both the defensiveness and naivety displayed at times, as well as the genuine yearning to be better. I firmly believe Maddie is a great main character for people who are new to learning these concepts (abolition theory, mutual aid, anti-racism, intersectional feminism, etc) to follow, as we see that Maddie is not perfect, but she is given the space to be brave, and to try again.

I loved how Gestas recommended books to Maddie for her existential journey to "becoming an ally 101": Assata: An Autobiography by Assata Shakur, Are Prisons Obsolete? by Angela Davis, Black Marxism by J. Robinson, and a few more. The scene where these book recommendations happen is definitely one of my favorites. I appreciated how the discussion played out between Gestas & Maddie, and even though Maddie fumbled a lot (as Maddie does), I felt like this was a helpful way to outline the ideas of equity and social justice for people who are possibly reading about this for the first time! 

Overall, this book felt like a call to action, and a reminder to keep putting in the work, even if you don't see the fruits of your labor *right now*, it's still worth it, and the community/revolution still needs you to keep planting seeds! I loved the ending chapter with the metaphors of the mushrooms, and felt hopeful and inspired by the end of it.

This is the first book I've read by Sim, but I'm excited to check out more of their work! 

quotations that stood out to me: 
  • I just felt completely fucking haunted by drunk cis men. I did not want to make space for them in my life, ever again.
  • “That is why you are going to war, Angel. Because the property of corporations is threatened.
  • "You think there’s a single book by a Black author about the Jim Crow South where the hero is a white man? Hell the fuck no. And y’all aren’t teaching Richard Wright or Zora Neale Hurston or Toni Morrison, are you?”
  • I must’ve looked like a fish, with my mouth hanging open in the air. The truth of what he’d said knocked the wind out of me, and I couldn’t find a single lie to argue with. How had I never seen it like that?
  • “It’s because I’m Black and a dropout and a prisoner. That’s why I have a ‘better analysis,’ and that’s something you can’t buy, not like a college degree. Plus, I read a fuck-ton."
  • “You realize this is unpaid intellectual labor I am doing for you?” He quirked an eyebrow at me, but he was grinning. Book people can’t help it—we love recommending books.
  • “Now are you sure you can handle this? It’s gonna fuck you up.” He handed me a well-worn copy of Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed. Taking it in my hands felt like holding a bomb. But I was ready for it to blow up whatever walls it was coming for. I worked so hard to be a good teacher, but no matter what I did, every class felt like a battle, every day a miserable slog through failure. If communists knew why my students loathed me, I was willing to hear what they had to say.
  • “That was before I realized just how precious pride is. How dangerous it is to the people in power, and that’s why they want to take it away from you. That’s why they scare little kids with stories of burning for eternity just for having a backbone.”
  • “What did he steal? Why did he steal it? What if he needed it to survive, or for his family? What were the material conditions that led to the theft? And why is stealing a crime anyways? What is property? What is ownership? Why is it valued more than a man’s life?”
  • “Do you know there’s been a two-hundred-percent increase in prisoner deaths since AHICA started? Because how the fuck are we supposed to live on five bucks a day? People are starving to death in their own homes. We gotta rely on the kindness of strangers, or family, to feed us and house us—and so do you know how much that opens us up to abuse?"
  • Even if we weren’t victorious now, the work we had put in mattered, sowed seeds for the future. The words felt empty to me, and I was trying not to cry, bidding farewell to the Lab in my heart.
  • “Millions of Black people have become literal prisoners in their own homes for minor carbon fraud offenses. Meanwhile, white people and corporations keep polluting to their hearts’ content—as long as they pay a pittance to ‘offset’ their carbon footprints.”
  • “We’re taking a stand here to protest the eviction of hundreds of families in this community. If you believe that Black neighborhoods matter, join us. If you believe we should invest in our existing communities, rather than building new hyperways out to developments in the suburbs, join us! If you want the government to stop blaming climate change on our most vulnerable people, join us! And together, we can save the Eighth!”
  • “Hell, I know I’m supposed to go easy on people in your situation but . . . I mean, can I just point out—it’s a bit white-savior-y isn’t it? To blame yourself for everything that happened? Like, the movement did not come down to you. You are not, and could never have been, our savior. You’re just . . . Maddie Ryan.”
  • Her comrades in Save the Eighth were her friends, and over the course of this year, we’d become her friends too. That’s why she’d invited Gestas to stay with her. All that bickering over leftist theory and tactics? That was friendship to Shayna.
  • An excavator can tear down a building, but it can’t tear down our desire for revolution.
  • "So protest movements always spread the spores for the next protest movement. Like mushrooms, they’re only meant to last a short while. Hell, the Free People’s Village was a sturdy little mushroom—we were out there for months! And since then, all the zillions of spores we sent into the world? They’ve been growing. Trust. Now we just got to wait for the next time conditions are right—and be ready. In the meantime, we grow our network—we spread our mycelium, we strengthen our community.”
  • When it comes to defeating capitalism, I’m not so naïve as to think we can win. Not how you think. Not decisively, for all time. All our protests, all our organizing, they can’t defeat the tanks and gas and guns and greed machines—at least not forever, not right now. So what I think, these days, is you have to accept that there’s no winning, and learn to live for the joy of the struggle. And for maybe. Maybe someday.
  • This city, this state, this country is not free, but for those few shining hours, in that torus of space-time, those of us marching—we were free.
  • Every day that the Village stood was a battle we won against empire.
  • Ever since City Hall, living through each day has required a conscious choice. I intend to stick around.
  • I have tasted a free world a few times now, and I crave another bite. I will go to work and walk my dog. I will bide my time, waiting for the conditions to be just right, waiting for the sun and rain and rage and suffering to accumulate just so. I want to be there when the new world tries to give birth to itself again. I want to be there when the injustice grows so thick that people find courage in themselves they never knew existed. 
  • Abolish police, end fossil fuels, and land back!
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