Strange Horizons review of Naomi Kritzer's Liberty's Daughter

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Liberty's Daughter Cover (dome-shaped platforms built atop spiraling pillars rise dramatically from a churning ocean)
(Cover Artist: Leon Tukker)
A review I wrote of Naomi Kritzer's novel Liberty's Daughter is currently up in the most recent issue of Strange Horizons. This book is a Young Adult novel that was adapted in part from a series of shorter works written by the author, and centers around a fictional libertarian community located on a seastead--a network of artificial islands located in the pacific ocean. The novel follows a single protagonist named Beck Garrison, who as the story begins is drawn into a missing person's case after learning of a woman who has mysteriously vanished from her job preparing food at one of the seastead's cafeterias.

The book's broader story ultimately comes to follow Beck as she slowly learns more of the oppressively individualistic society existing within the seastead's community. In the process, she begins to more directly contend with the social status and privilege which she retains as the daughter of one of the seastead's few officially recognized citizens, and the entrenched social inequity permeating this society. An excerpt from my review is below:

As the novel opens, the seastead has persisted in an ambiguous legal state for nearly forty-nine years. While the mainland United States government refuses to acknowledge this society’s independence (pointedly calling its embassy on the seastead not an embassy but an institute), it has also paradoxically neglected to arrest the many well-known corporate criminals who have fled here to avoid prosecution for their crimes. Over the course of Liberty's Daughter, Kritzer uses this setup to explore contrasting articulations of human rights and social responsibilities, with the seastead slowly revealed to be an intensely authoritarian community in its own right.

In all I had a little bit of a mixed impression of this book. Like I wrote in the review, there are a lot of really fascinating themes with regards to social responsibility and the necessity of activism which Kritzer introduces. The story of how Beck navigates the seastead and learns of its deceptively authoritarian ideology weaves together a pretty diverse sequence of narrative arcs and subplots, but Kritzer is also able to merge these stories together in a way that never feels forced or contrived.

At the same time however, there were several critical moments when I felt that the novel retreated from a broader social commentary that the story was poised to enact. The result was an extremely intricate and unique narrative, but also one that still felt limited due to how it never extends its discussion of the problems of the seastead's libertarian ideology beyond the narrow context of the seastead itself.

Either way, Liberty's Daughter was still a book that I enjoyed reading. The full review which I wrote for Strange Horizons can be found here.

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