What does "free" even mean?
We are the children of new-new age millennials with a romantic idea of us growing up like it's the 1990s. Although they themselves still conform to the digitalisation of society, constantly bookended by targeted ads and complying with the government recommendation of inserting bank-issued ID chips in their wrists, they expect us to thrive on a diet of sunsets and mix tapes. But you know what? We have seen our future in our parents' hamster wheel lives, under the thumb of algorithms and corporations, and we say: fine by us. Other teens at our school have secret social media accounts that they check in the dead of night, but not us. We reject it all. They call us The Analogue Anarchists just for embracing an analogue life, and for refusing to Agree to our School Portal’s updated Terms and Conditions. They haven’t seen anything yet…
Seventeen-year-old River has been uprooted from her cool city life and forced to move to an idyllic village in the middle of Nowhere, so clearly her life is over. Falling in love with the mercurial Vilda should be the most exciting thing to happen amongst all this nothing, but the idyll is an illusion and the more time River spends with Vilda and her misfit friends, the more she begins to see the world around her with new eyes.
So when tragedy strikes and school becomes a divisive battle ground, River is the first to take a stand for what is right and in doing so, she unearths a whole web of corruption which sets her and her new friends on a path from which there is no return.
Free School is a sapphic anti-romance woven into a political drama, which takes place in the near future and deals with themes that should be dystopian. It is the first book in a trilogy, which follows River and her friends as they stand up to increasing levels of corruption in the pursuit of freedom—whatever that means…
