“...Look, Shayna’s just playing by the ruling class’s rules. She's protesting in exactly the way capitalism loves for us to protest. You take the collective rage and grief of a thousand people, give them a permit to march down the street, then let them shout until they're tired and go home. They let us feel like we've done something - only we've disrupted nothing.” He flung his hands out in exasperation. “We've dealt no damage to the economic systems that are burning up the world, or the structural inequalities that keep black Americans poor and enslaved through AHICA. We've just made wind, going up to space.”

This book made me furious. Furious that it's so easy to imagine climate activism being sublimated by capitalism (in fact, we don't need to imagine - it's happening right now). Furious that conventional forms of protest and resistance are powerless to effect meaningful change. And, perhaps in contradiction to my 5 star rating, furious at the book for never taking that step towards truly revolutionary action. In that regard, I was reminded of R.F. Kuang’s Babel, another book seemingly content to wallow in mere civil disobedience.

Still, this is an incredibly important book. It's a baseball bat to the surveillance drone of the carceral state, highlighting how economic, societal, and educational structures maintain all sorts of prisons, not just brick-and-mortar penitentiaries. But it is also a rallying cry for every group and demographic opposed to those systems: the poor, people of colour, indigenous peoples, the LGBTQ community; communists, socialists, anarchists. The systems of oppression need to keep us apart, squabbling over trivialities. But if we unite, we stand a chance.