When She Walks, the Revolution’s Comin’
Envision, if you will, a 2023 in which Al Gore had been awarded victory in the controversial presidential election of 2000. The country would surely look somewhat different as Gore would have enacted environmental policies that shaped how things developed over the following decades. But would anything be fundamentally different?
This is the central conceit in Sim Kern’s astonishing and thought-provoking novel The Free People’s Village. Gore’s victory has indeed resulted in quite a difference in certain aspects of life as all transportation is electrically powered, products that generate high-carbon emissions have become heavily taxed luxury items, and the warming of the planet is slowing in intensity. For all these differences, though, the alternative political history has not changed the discrimination and injustice faced by many in our society.
The Free People’s Village is, at once, a story of growing up, love, activism, allyship, protest, and sex, drugs, rock & roll. The narrative follows Maddie, a young teacher who also plays guitar in the punk band Bunny Bloodlust. Maddie spends most of her free time with her bandmates in a large warehouse they have fashioned into a living space/art collective/performance venue. When the city announces plans to demolish the entire neighborhood in a transportation infrastructure upgrade, the members of the band and their fans launch a protest. As the protest becomes larger and larger, and begins to garner national press attention, Maddie begins to see the bigger picture of how the community will be affected by the city’s proposed plans. Though initially spurred to action by anger over how this demolition would affect her and those immediately close to her, she realizes that what she initially saw as an unsavory and somewhat derelict neighborhood has been home to hundreds of families for generations.
Even though she considers herself educated, open-minded, and empathetic, this realization shows Maddie how many of society’s ugly realities her privilege has shielded her from. Newly awakened, she dives full force into a rapidly accelerating struggle for the future of the community, a struggle that is part Orwellian fever dream and part medieval pitch battle.
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