This was not quite up to my expectations established from the excellent Luminaries—but it was also by no means a let down, either. It has got its finger on the pulse of the moment: intersectional polarizations of class and identity culminate into a pressure cooker type drama centered on a seemingly innocuous “anarchist” gardening collective, “invading” peoples’ property to plant. When a tycoon offers them solvency to “keep doing what they’re doing”, well things get complicated and spiral fairly quickly.

Read this mostly for the characters and themes, not the plot, and you’ll be pleased, I think. Everyone feels vibrant and deliberate, playing into the plot at key points, while fleshing out the ideologies. To some degree it requires that the characters be ideologues because of this, but actually, because there’s so much poured into them they don’t feel like condensed ideas at a macro level butting heads.