ebook_em's Reviews (960)

This book is about two teenage enemies: one gets bitten by a magical snake and turns into a ghost, and the other must use her inherited ghost-speaking abilities to rescue him from a permanent death. Through their quest to find the antidote to magical snake venom, they fall in love.

Unfortunately, I liked the premise much better than the execution. There were so many cartoonish villains and monsters in this story. The dialogue often felt forced and the plot was a bit disjointed. The romance aspect felt pretty rushed at the end. I did like the ghost speaking magic and I think this book will find its readers — I’m bummed that I’m not one of them. 

My thanks to NetGalley and HarperCollins for an eARC of this book.

The Free People’s Village is a heavy, immersive read that made me feel equal parts anger, sadness, pride, hope, and cringe. I get the sense that evoking each of those feelings was intentional. 

The plot unfolds in an alternate timeline in which Al Gore won the 2000 presidential election and declared a “War on Climate Change.” As a policy researcher, I was so impressed by how Sim Kern revealed what can go wrong in the implementation of liberal policies — like rich people abusing the carbon tax system and greenwashing galore — and how the Democratic platform on climate change is totally insufficient to tackle environmental racism and imperialism. In fact, this story shows how the “war” on climate change could be weaponized in very conventional ways against people of the global majority. The fact that climate policies in this story were used to further expand the scope of policing also felt chillingly realistic. 

The coalition of organizations, activists, homeless folks, and others who made up the Free People’s Village seemed very real as well. I loved Kern’s depiction of the boring and mundane aspects of organizing (figuring out how often to empty the port-a-potties is something I’ve had to do and didn’t care to remember, lol) plus the circular, mind-numbing infighting that is inevitable in any long-term organizing effort. Around the middle of the story, there’s an inciting incident when the movement fractures into very different tactics — the secrecy, guilt, and political questions around this incident were really compelling. 

I also appreciated the treatment of SA in this book. Rape culture and flimsy restorative justice responses to violence within activist spaces are way more typical than many organizers want to acknowledge. Not including some mention of sexual violence in an encampment setting would’ve felt like a major omission, but it didn’t feel perfunctory as a plot line either. All these examples highlight Kern’s explorations of power dynamics throughout the book: between landlords and tenants, cops and citizens, people with criminal records and those without, Black & Indigenous organizers and white voyeurs, cis and trans people, etc. The depiction of the technologies and media also seemed true to life; in many ways, this book felt like a fiction analog to Zeynep Tufekci’s “Twitter and Tear Gas.” 

Now for the aspects that will be unappealing to some readers. The first-person POV of the white main character, Maddie, is cringeworthy more often than not. The cringe factor is intentional, as Maddie is a young white teacher and baby activist entering Black-led organizing spaces for the first time, and she messes up a lot in the process. I thought the author did a pretty good job of not making this a white savior story, though there were times Maddie could’ve taken more ownership of her actions without endless coaching from Black and brown people. Maddie participates in some actions but repeatedly chickens out and mostly does grunt work while her friends and bandmates do the more high-profile leadership work. Even though her inner thoughts are painful to read, I think her perspective will resonate with people. Some readers might also be turned off by the didactic tone of the book. Personally, I don’t mind heavy-handed social commentary in fiction and thought it made sense to learn fundamental theories and principles through Maddie’s naive POV. 

Overall, this was a great read that left me with a lot to think about. My thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for an advanced reader copy.

Just wasn’t feeling it. The first two essays/stories felt pointless.