June 1, 2023
Stories of alternate histories for our world provide authors with space to ponder just what effects changes both large and small yield. In Kern's The Free People's Village, Al Gore became president following the 2000 election with a democratic supermajority and the country saw a War on Climate Change rather than Terror. By 2020, 24-year-old protagonist and teacher Maddie rides a maglev train to work and is too young to remember gas-powered cars dominating the highways. Unfortunately this ""war"" did not address systemic inequalities or racism so protests similar to those in our time line occur. The protests, the activism, the oppressively violent reaction from the state, and the formation of the titular village centered on the club where Maddie's queer punk band performs dramatically shift her worldview. Maddie's involvement includes confronting her own white privilege, complicity in gentrification, and internal biases. A powerful story of justice denied and the legacy of activism as well as a personal journey of growth. For those who wish to learn bravery, solidarity, and community.
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July 1, 2023
In an alternative present in which Al Gore won the 2000 election, Maddie Ryan comes to her own radical awakening on the Houston streets as an accidental member of a riotous people's uprising. The year is 2020. The war on terror has been replaced with the war on climate change, and most aspects of daily life must navigate the labyrinthine Bureau of Carbon Regulation. Maddie Ryan is a white woman in her mid-20s, newly divorced, and teaching at a predominantly Black school in Houston whose students seem to loathe her. When she meets Fish--"a soft, six-foot-two giant" with "a wild red beard, mad-scientist hair"--she is first attracted to him only because he is the polar opposite of her Bible-thumping, sexually conflicted ex. When Fish buys a derelict warehouse in Houston's historically Black Eighth Ward with the aim of creating "an anarcho-communist creative space," however, Maddie realizes a relationship with him comes with other benefits. In the Lab, Maddie meets Red (xe/xim) and Gestas (he/him), who together form the guitar-and-drum punk duo Bunny Bloodlust. Gestas, a home-incarcerated carbon felon whose gender presentation involves both a beard and "a baby-pink, pleated, A-line skirt," fascinates Maddie, but Red, who is "tall and laconic," with "sweat-slicked black hair falling across xir eyes," makes her "heart fly off in wild, syncopated rhythms" from the first. In spite of her "queer-hating, strict Catholic" upbringing, Maddie embraces the world that opens to her at the Lab, wins over Red and Gestas with her church youth group-earned guitar chops, joins Bunny Bloodlust, and begins a political awakening guided by Gestas' extensive library of leftist theory. Then she finds a third and final notice of eviction from the city in Fish's mailbox. Faced with the dissolution of her new world, Maddie joins the ongoing effort to Save the Eighth and quickly becomes part of a movement with bigger dreams and far more drastic consequences than she could have imagined. This fierce, frenetic, and intensely impassioned novel takes a deep dive into the damage neoliberal thinking wreaks on marginalized communities; however, it also consistently prioritizes the identity politics of its multiply marginalized characters over the nuance of complex, unpredictable, fully human individuals capable of speaking to the reader's heart rather than to the better angels of our ideologies. A fervent look at a world that mirrors our own but fails to fully reflect it.
COPYRIGHT(2023) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.