Is access to housing a basic human right? The characters in this debut novel, a group of starry-eyed idealists, certainly believe so. They take over an abandoned building and spend their days scavenging dumpsters for the items discarded by a rising tide of yuppies in order to fix the crumbling infrastructure. When one of the newest arrivals, a wayward former junkie named Amelia, becomes pregnant by a married man in the building, lives become insidiously entangled—and surprisingly upsetting drama ensues. Author Cari Luna pits the residents' personal struggles against the larger backdrop of historical events in New York in the 1990s, when the city tried to evict the squatters to put in condo developments. But this is not a story of good versus evil: Luna shows how youthful dreams and a life lived just above the poverty line can ossify into something heart-breaking. "They've been so busy surviving they haven't noticed their lives hardening around them, fixing them into place," she writes about the oldest residents. "They are now all they're ever going to be." In the end, the novel examines how years of fighting for what you believe in both devastates and transforms, as each of these characters struggles to find a place to call home.
— Andrea Walker
