The Sunshine Crust Baking Factory

March 30, 2015
In Wakefield’s novel, Williamsburg, Brooklyn in 1995 is “the other side of the moon,” a desolate wasteland, replete with stray dogs. Sid, an adventure-seeking squatter, decides to take on the challenge of “the new frontier,” becoming fed up with the cliquey and over-capacity squats in Manhattan’s Lower East Side. She convinces Lorenzo, a musician and “glue-sniffing badass from Mexico City,” to join her, and they depart for Brooklyn with their army backpacks and boots to squat at an abandoned commercial bakery with a team of other social misfit residents. Wakefield, author of the nonfiction book Not for Rent (also on the topic of squatting), draws on personal experience for this colorful and entertaining depiction. Though the dialogue is occasionally contrived and risks turning characters into caricatures, the sentiment of the nomadic community in New York in the ’90s comes alive through historical references and Sid’s journey as she forges a network of like-minded individuals.

March 1, 2015
The lives of young, poor New Yorkers form the center of this novel by Wakefield (Not for Rent, 1994, etc.), no stranger to squatter chic.In 1995, a tattooed young woman named Sid hits America's largest city with confidence: "I thought getting a room at a squat would be a cinch. These were my people, right?" But ingratiating herself into this world proves more challenging than expected, leading to a series of friendships and relationships, adventures and mishaps, all narrated in a conversational style. Sometimes this style is winning; other times-as when Wakefield writes, "I could hardly believe my luck. Lorenzo from Disguerro! He was so cool! We were going to be a team!"-it feels pedestrian. Wakefield clearly understands the mixture of romance and seediness in hipster poverty; it's a believable world she creates, especially in long party scenes, which are appropriately chaotic, veering from punk shows to apartments and then across bridges. A particularly strong sequence involves Sid and her friends rescuing some personal belongings from an apartment building the night before the city tears it down. But sometimes the characters-young men and women interested in bands, poetry, and zines-feel interchangeable, and the novel becomes a swirl of meaningless names and action. The biggest problem is Sid herself. What makes her story worthwhile? It's sometimes difficult to say. There's a promising chapter when circumstances force her to move to the suburbs with her dad and stepmother; alas, the reader learns nothing from seeing Sid in this new setting, and after a few pages of stiff dialogue, she returns to the city. Will other readers find the squatting life as inherently interesting as the author does? A book that Wakefield's characters would love but that might leave other readers locked out.

May 1, 2015
It's 1995, and Sid has just arrived in New York City, determined to join the so-called anarchist scene. Not only has she rejected mainstream societywhich she has made crystal clear to her father before leaving homeshe also sports a new tattoo and has brought along her tattered, dog-eared copy of Hopping Freight Trains. I thought getting a room at a squat would be a cinch. These were my people, right? But as she soon discovers, finding a squat is not so easy. A decade earlier, she could have settled in the Lower East Side, but the scene has moved further afield, to Brooklyn's Williamsburg neighborhood, which is rife with boarded-up buildings and roaming packs of wild dogs. Still, it was right over the river, Sid reasons hopefully. It was the new frontier. Wakefield wrote an intrepid nonfiction book about modern squatting, Not for Rent (1996), and now vividly fictionalizes the experience, portraying various oddball characters with empathy and insight in her charmingly laid-back, dialogue-rich first novel.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2015, American Library Association.)