 Popsugar Reading Challenge category: A dystopia with a happy ending.
City of Refuge, by Starhawk. This is the sequel to Starhawk's utopian book, The Fifth Sacred Thing. It takes place 20+ years after a civil war that tore the United States apart. Northern California is now Califia, a thriving democracy where everyone is entitled to food, shelter, and basic human rights. Southern California is controlled by a few oligarchs who use debt to enslave men for fighting and women for trafficking. In the previous book, Califia defeated an invasion by persuading a critical mass of Southland soldiers to switch sides, offering them a better home and society than the one they'd fought for. In this book, Madrone (a healer) travels with her lover Bird (a musician) to build a "city of refuge," a place of safety and beauty in an abandoned part of Los Angeles. Although the Southland people have been fed constant propaganda about the "evil socialists" in the North, they can also see what's in front of their faces. Food and water are rationed, children are taken away for "debt," and life is generally miserable in the South. Madrone and Bird gradually recruit people to join them in the hidden city, and they in turn recruit others. This book seems less idealistic than The Fifth Sacred Thing. There are deaths of characters we care about, including a child. And the "good guys" have to use violence, including killing, though they aren't casual or sanguine about it. There's a lot of forgiveness offered: Bird previously betrayed his people under torture, and there's also River, a teenager who committed atrocities for the Southlands before switching sides. We see Southland defectors struggle with seeing themselves as independent people instead of instruments of the regime. The story isn't utopian, but it's still optimistic: a better world is possible, if the people stop accepting oppression as inevitable.
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