I unabashedly love this book!

Sure, it's about apocalypse (in this case socio-economic), and the story is spun around the reuniting of a group of master criminals, but at its core "Liberation" is about people, about the myth of America, and how normal people deal with calamity and find unexpected reserves of courage and goodness in the midst of it all.

Slattery, using the guise of an entity called the Vibe[edit], explores a splintered American landscape--horrors and private victories in equal measure--with dream-like prose and a gentle narrative arc. Unlike most dystopian stories, "Liberation" is suffused with hope...

Slattery's writing has a definite groove, a rhythm, it's beautiful to read, moreso out loud.

I recommend this book, and this author, to those who are looking for a jolt in their reading beyond clever plots and concepts, for something that strikes at the center of why we pick up books in the first place... ( )

Posted to my Livejournal in August 2008:

Liberation was unusual, to say the least. It was strange and smart, and reminded me a little of literary post-modern writers like Pynchon or David Foster Wallace, only less so. The writing was neat, too; the words flowed kind of like spoken word or beat poetry, with long, rambling cadenced sentences. It's pretty unique for an apocalypse story, too, since America crashes because of economic collapse, and it plays out in pretty believable ways, with spot-on social commentary -- well, except for the magical realism and hallucinatory dreams and zany events. It's not for everyone but I enjoyed it. ( )

The future looks bleak. ( )

I could explain the plot but it's complicated and wide-ranging and, ultimately, irrelevant.

This book is Funny. Only the second book I've ever laughed out loud at (One Jump Ahead by Mark Van Name is the other). Smart (you feel like you're actually picking up tips for surviving the economic Armageddon). Trippy and expansive (a murderous, mechanized Circus marauds the midwest, a Native American ghost army makes the horrible karma of the Dakotas mainfest). Plus it has the best quote of all time that captures the feeling of the 60s without miring us hopelessly in its annoyingly long shadow:
"Peaches en Regalia" flows over him, the bugle call for a hippie army that marched at the peak of the American parabola, that moment when physics held its breath to allow levitation, a small reward before the descent. The hippies knew it then...they couldn't build it into words but they could feel it; a floating in the stomach as history shifted direction...and America was prying off the shackles of its past. The vision opened up to them and winked out again, and those it blinded staggered through their lives unable to see anything else, while the rest of them wondered if they had only dreamed it."

A must read for anyone who thinks about levitating the pentagon. ( )

A fun, stylish adventure through a future United States that has collapsed under its own weight, Liberation is a jazz riff on post-apocalyptic dystopias that almost becomes urban fantasy at times. I really liked all the characters, with their quirky names and Ocean's 11-style ironic detachment. This is a world I could see myself returning to on a regular basis. ( )