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Cari Luna

The Revolution of Every Day (Tin House New Voice) Paperback – Deckle Edge, September 24, 2013

by Cari Luna (Author)

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Inspired by the midnineties squat evictions on New York's Lower East Side, Cari Luna's gritty debut novel vividly imagines the lives of five squatters, showing readers a life that few people, including New Yorkers who passed the squats every day, know about or understand.

In the midnineties, New York’s Lower East Side contained a city within its shadows: a community of squatters who staked their claims on abandoned tenements and lived and worked within their own parameters, accountable to no one but each other. On May 30, 1995, the NYPD rolled an armored tank down East Thirteenth Street and hundreds of police officers in riot gear mobilized to evict a few dozen squatters from two buildings. With gritty prose and vivid descriptions, Cari Luna’s debut novel, The Revolution of Every Day, imagines the lives of five squatters from that time. But almost more threatening than the city lawyers and the private developers trying to evict them are the rifts within their community. Amelia, taken in by Gerrit as a teen runaway seven years earlier, is now pregnant by his best friend, Steve. Anne, married to Steve, is questioning her commitment to the squatter lifestyle. Cat, a fading legend of the downtown scene and unwitting leader of one of the squats, succumbs to heroin. The misunderstandings and assumptions, the secrets and the dissolution of the hope that originally bound these five threaten to destroy their homes as surely as the city’s battering rams. Amid this chaos, Amelia struggles with her ambivalence about becoming a mother while knowing that her pregnancy has given her fellow squatters a renewed purpose to their fight―securing the squats for the next generation. Told from multiple points of view, The Revolution of Every Day shows readers a life that few people, including the New Yorkers who passed the squats every day, know about or understand.

Print length

392 pages
Language

English
Publisher

Tin House Books
Publication date

September 24, 2013
Dimensions

5.1 x 1.1 x 7.8 inches
ISBN-10

1935639641
ISBN-13

978-1935639640
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Paisley Rekdal
40
Paperback
44 offers from $3.50

Editorial Reviews

From Booklist

It’s 1994, and Rudy Giuliani wants to oust a group of hard-working homesteaders from their makeshift home in an abandoned building on New York’s Lower East Side. Led by Dutch immigrant Gerrit, a veteran squatter who fled Amsterdam after a violent eviction, and Steve, a tough-talking, philandering handyman of Puerto Rican heritage, the community readies for a fight to save Thirteen House (so-called for its address on Thirteenth Street). Spanning seven months, from a difficult winter into the fresh hope of spring, Luna portrays the thorny, complicated relationships among addicts and runaways in various stages of recovery with riveting passion and heartrending realism. Luna’s narrator moves with omniscient ease into the minds of Steve and Gerrit, as well as young, pregnant Amelia and the feline rehabilitation expert, Cat, an especially sympathetic character. Luna unspools the tales of the Thirteen House residents while ticking off the weeks and days until Amelia’s delivery and the impending siege by armored police. Luna’s forceful, unflinching debut is a love song for a Manhattan long lost to high-end boutiques and high-rise condos. --Diego Báez

Review

*Winner of the 2015 Oregon Book Award for Fiction

"Luna creates an array of complex characters caught up in emotions, relationships and situations far from the ordinary as they examine their commitment to their merged family and explore their own ideals and expectations. Enlightening and marked by inventive subject matter, intense reflection and stark eloquence."
—Kirkus Reviews

"Luna portrays the thorny, complicated relationships among addicts and runaways in various stages of recovery with riveting passion and heartrending realism."
—Booklist

"Excellent debut novel. . .Her characters are deeply sympathetic and richly drawn, portrayed as struggling New Yorkers first, political outliers second."
—LA Times Book Review

"The characters are superbly flawed, and Luna expertly leads us through their vastly different psyches and makes us understand them, even if we don't always sympathize. But just as much as it is a novel of characters, The Revolution of Every Day is the story of a city that's struggling with gentrification, as Cat puts it, "All the way back to the Dutch and the Indians, yeah?"
—Bust Magazine (Five Stars)

"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."
—O, The Oprah Magazine, Book of the Week

"[A] juicy read, filled with secret trysts, unexpected pregnancies and mysterious personal histories . . . . Giuliani sent NYPD tanks (yes, they have tanks) into Alphabet City to oust the squatters who were responsible, at least in part, for making the neighborhood livable again, and while this is a fictional account, it truly takes you back to an earlier version of the same old New York struggle over class, space and the right to make a home for yourself in this city.
—Annaliese Griffin, Brooklyn Based

"The Revolution of Every Day is a novel that will not seem like a first. It feels evolved, it feels like it has been written with the tender, yet confident, and concentrated touch of someone who has done it many times before."
—Busking at the Seams

"Luna exposes us, with tenderness and eyes open wide, to the strange and vivid beauty of a time and place we may otherwise turn from. She provides us with a satisfying opportunity to explore a foreign world."
—The Oregonian—The Revolution of Every Day picked as one of the top 10 Northwest books of 2013!

"Luna skillfully ties the plight of Thirteen House and its profoundly human residents to the gentrification of the city as a whole, illustrating how someone can feel at once completely part of a city, and powerless against it."
—The Portland Mercury

"In Cari Luna's debut novel, the hope, misunderstandings, and assumptions that bind five squatters living in New York City's Lower East Side during the mid-1990s threaten to unravel when developers and lawyers try to evict them from the abandoned dwellings."
—Education Week: Bookmarks

"Cari Luna's novel is as heroic as her until-now-unsung characters. Salvaging the abandoned and derelict, rooting life in what before was barren waste, Luna's urban homesteaders exhibit the same valiance as Luna the novelist: she has rescued recent, all-but-forgotten history from beneath the bulldozers of 'progress'; she has breathed new life into a lost world."
—Susan Choi, author of My Education

“Cari Luna shines a light in the dark corners of New York that most people don’t see. Her vivid portrayal of the squatters of Thirteenth Street and their fierce struggle to keep their community alive is an elegy for a city that no longer exists.”
—Elliott Holt, author of You Are One of Them

“Set in the dramatic world of the Lower East Side at the zenith of repeated waves of gentrification, The Revolution of Every Day manages to remain faithful to its own oceanic emotions. Much like the golden haze of an old photo, the novel evokes memory at its most transitory—inflected by hope, damaged by reality. Luna’s love for the New York of this time and its complexities shows through on every page.”
—Vanessa Veselka, author of Zazen

“Cari Luna’s The Revolution of Every Day is a bold, intrepid look into a world that when we are our lesser selves we would rather pass by than dwell in. But in this world, she finds devotion, loyalty, and, more eloquently, human relationships persisting in all their messiness, complexity, and glory. Like all great fiction, this novel will force us to reevaluate our perspective about the way things are and with more open hearts and minds consider how they ought to be; and by making us more tolerant, less provincial, and changing our mind-set, even if by degrees, it may make a difference when we reenter the vibrant but flawed society it portrays.”
—Ernesto Mestre-Reed, author of The Second Death of Unica Aveyano

"Cari Luna's beautiful, carefully rendered debut novel not only captures a specific moment in time in marvelous detail but also shows how our particular lives are moved by forces beyond us that we strive to understand and resist only at the greatest cost. A remarkable, unusual book."
—Emily Mitchell, author of The Last Summer of the World

"Cari Luna gets her hands dirty with her characters, digging deep and exposing vulnerable underbellies that some lesser writers might not dare explore. Masterful, precise, and utterly affecting, The Revolution of Every Day will change what you think about what makes a family, what makes a life, and how to love."
—Sara Shepard, author of Everything We Ever Wanted

"Cari Luna's beautifully written novel packs an emotional wallop for lifetime New Yorkers like me. I knew precious little about the Lower East Side squatters' movement while it was happening—my mistake. Luna makes a compelling case that flawed, wounded souls are often political visionaries. A major achievement."
—Susan Brownmiller, author of Against Our Will: Men, Women, and Rape

Product details

Publisher ‏ : ‎ Tin House Books; 0 edition (September 24, 2013)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Paperback ‏ : ‎ 392 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 1935639641
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1935639640
Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 15.6 ounces
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 5.1 x 1.1 x 7.8 inches

Best Sellers Rank: #662,181 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #1,876 in Fiction Urban Life
- #28,252 in Literary Fiction (Books)

Customer Reviews:
38 ratings

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Cari Luna

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Cari Luna is the author of The Revolution of Every Day, which won the 2015 Oregon Book Award for Fiction. Her writing has appeared in Salon, Jacobin, Electric Literature, The Rumpus, PANK, and elsewhere. Cari lives in Portland, Oregon.

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Bill Wolfe

A novel that everyone who loves New York City needs to read

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on February 29, 2016

Verified Purchase

If you felt the axis of the literary world tilt recently, it was just the movement of writers and other creative types west from New York City to Portland, now often referred to as the Brooklyn of the West Coast. Portland has always been a bookish town — it wouldn’t be home to the massive Powell’s Books complex if it weren’t — but now it seems there are nearly as many writers as readers in the City of Roses.

So it should come as no surprise that a lot of good writing is coming out of PDX now. Two prime examples are the recent novels by Cari Luna and Ellen Urbani. While both are set in other cities — former homes of the authors — but they share a certain aesthetic: intensely focused, character driven stories where the setting is one of the protagonists and the prose sings.

Luna’s The Revolution of Every Day follows a group of ambitious squatters (no, that’s not an oxymoron) as they save NYC’s Lower East Side in the mid-1990s. The NYC of 20 years ago was a much more difficult place than it is today; the LES had been more or less abandoned by developers and middle class residents and had become a neighborhood of derelict buildings, high crime, and drug use. Enter a ragtag group of down-and-outers who slowly bind themselves into extended families, each living in one reclaimed building. Novelist Susan Choi aptly refers to them as “urban homesteaders.”

Revolution follows one small group of characters in one building as they try to save themselves by turning “Thirteen House” first into a home and then into a community. Amelia was a runaway taken in by Dutch immigrant Gerrit seven years earlier. Steve and Anne are the den parents of the building. While Gerrit is the silent planner and worrier, Steve is the driven rabble-rouser with the ability to work a room and make things happen. Cat is a legend of the downtown scene who runs the nearby Cat House but is now a shadow of her former sylph.

Luna puts us inside Thirteen House, allowing us to get to know the main characters, their dreams, and the fraught histories that brought them together. They are determined, even desperate, to create a communal, humane lifestyle in the former tenement that they have rebuilt with found materials and sweat equity. Doing so is the only way they can live, work, and dream in the city and avoid returning to their hometowns or anyplace else.

Gerrit’s slowly developing love for the younger Amelia remains unrequited, although she is grateful and indebted to him for saving her life. Steve and Anne maintain a marriage and partnership that is the envy of their peers but which has recently developed cracks in the foundation. Amelia is pregnant, and Gerrit is not the father. Anne is having doubts about whether the squatter’s life is really what she wants. Add to these domestic dramas the fact that Mayor Giuliani’s mission to clean up the city includes reclaiming the blocks of abandoned buildings and selling them to developers as part of a gentrification project.

After living and fighting the power with these characters for nearly 400 pages, I felt as if I had made (and then lost) several friends when the book ended on a bittersweet note (no spoilers here!). They have taken up residence in my mind and appear to be settling in permanently. The Revolution of Every Day is a novel that everyone who loves, or has ever loved, New York City needs to read.

Please check out my review of "Landfall" by Ellen Urbani (referenced above).

For more reviews of literary fiction by women authors, visit readherlikeanopenbook.com.

4 people found this helpful

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Karen Lea Hansen

Beautiful, Powerful, Intense

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on September 11, 2014

Verified Purchase

I love stories about fringe societies and outsiders. Stories about lives that are so completely opposite of my own fascinate me. The theme is what really caught my attention in Cari Luna's debut novel, The Revolution of Every Day.

Set in the mid-90's, The Revolution of Every Day follows a group of squatters in New York City, who are forced into a legal battle to legitimize their claim on a building that they have occupied for over a decade. The story is not as simple as just a group fighting for their home, there is also plenty of tension in the group, as certain members question their role in the community and the depth of their commitment to the cause.

Luna tells her story through several different voices. There is Cat, a former junkie, turned leader and the resident old-timer of the group. Newly pregnant Amelia, a former teen runaway who was brought into the group by Gerrit, an expat from the Netherlands with a tragic past. Steve, a married man who is the father of Amelia's baby. Annie, Steve's unwitting wife, who joined the group to fight for social equality, but who longs to return to her middle-class roots. Luna's story is character based and although the fight for their home is a constant point of tension, the drama between the characters and the secrets that they hold within themselves, is really heart of the story.

All of the characters exist just at the edge of their individual breakpoint and the entire story is spent waiting to see who will crack first. It's surprising and engaging.

As always, Tin House has a great eye for debut authors. I read this book while on vacation and I absolutely couldn't put it down. Luna's rich characters and intense scenarios kept me wanting more. I flew through the story, needing to keep reading " just one more chapter" before bed or in stolen moments while waiting in lines at theme parks!

Luna's novel is a force to be reckoned with and I look forward to reading her future efforts.

Like my review? Check out my blog!

One person found this helpful

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Kindle Customer

Waiting for Godot?

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on May 11, 2015

Verified Purchase

I read this book because it won the Ken Kesey Award for best novel at the Oregon Book Awards. I'm still scratching my head. Why?

This very un-Oregon book takes place in '90s Manhattan when Rudy Guigliani and his thug policemen were crushing the squatter movement in the tenements so his cronies could get rich through gentrification.

I spent most of my reading waiting for something to happen. I guess I could have read just the last twenty pages. It's not that NOTHING happened in the rest of the book. Cari Luna spent a lot of time and space developing her characters, most of whom I did not like very much. Spoiler alert: My favorite character was killed. There was a lot of nice writing, but the book really bordered on the Women's Fiction genre. Not what I expected.

Two things really irritated me. First of all the image of "the closet door hanging open like a broken jaw." It simply doesn't work. Second was her ode to New York at the end. She speaks to the city as if it were a person "mourning for you." She seemed to have a difficult time letting go of the book. It seemed a bit sappy.

The writing was mostly quite pretty, but I can't recommend the book. I thought other books nominated for the award were more enjoyable.

4 people found this helpful

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Rebecca

Realistisch aber unüberraschend

Reviewed in Germany 🇩🇪 on April 17, 2018

Verified Purchase

Ich war sehr gespannt darauf ein Buch über das Leben in einem besetzten Haus. Die Beschreibungen von Gruppenarbeiten, Suppenküche und "Mülleimertauchen" sind alle sehr realistisch, das hat die Autorin sicher selbst erlebt. Hätte eigentlich alles gut gehen müssen bei diesem Buch.
Jedoch fand ich die Beziehung zweier der Hauptpersonen von Anfang an abstoßend. Habe mich beim Lesen richtig geekelt und nur das schlimmste erwartet, obwohl das sicher nicht die Absicht der Autorin war. Die jüngere war 16, obdachlos und drogenabhängig, als ein beinah 20 Jahre älterer Mann ihr sowohl ein Zimmer im Haus gab, als auch eine Beziehung mit ihr anfing. Klingt nicht gesund und ist es später im Buch auch nicht (ohne jetzt zu viel verraten zu wollen). Die Entwicklung der Geschichte hat mich dann auch nicht überrascht, obwohl die Autorin das wahrscheinlich wollte.

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