Avalon, Rise is a big, unruly novel about an Appalachian town filled with people trying to understand what it means to protect themselves.

The novel begins with Woody and Leroi, lifelong friends who end up sheltering in a barn after being ditched on the side of the road. When Woody wakes up, he discovers an antique Vandercook No. 4 letterpress, and that machine becomes one of the novel’s central objects: a tool for beauty, and protest. Later in the story, Woody makes gorgeous letterpress signs for demonstrations, but he also accepts commissions from Stasia, a woman who seems at first like a benefactor and opportunity, but is clearly. a leader of a white nationalist movement. Stasia owns the barn and tells Woody he can use the press whenever he wants. The question is what she expects in return.

Leroi, meanwhile, is drawn toward the collective that cooks every Sunday in the park, learning the habits and ethics of mutual aid in ways that are both funny and moving. Their friendship becomes one thread in a much larger community portrait that includes Eloise, the activist librarian; the punks at Food Not Bombs; Sharon, the social worker; Emma, a mother trying not to let her anger spill onto her children; Amber, who runs the Discipline Cafe; Sylvester, an unhoused man with a long history in town; and Matt Mistelthwaite, a World War II veteran with his own connection to the Vandercook. Madeline ffitch is interested in how people become entangled, how ideology enters a town through relationships, and ambiguity and she gently pulls threads throughout the story to explore this.

What I loved most is that this is truly an ensemble novel. The town itself feels like the subject: its grudges, loyalties, jokes, kitchens, public rooms, old wounds, and sometimes very strange alliances. The library becomes especially important, not just as a civic space, but as a contested one. When Stasia insists on hosting a European Heritage Rug Braiding workshop there, the event becomes absurd, alarming, and revealing all at once. ffitch understands that fascism does not always announce itself in the most obvious way.

This book is funny, but never careless. It is political, but not flattened into message. It takes anti-fascist resistance seriously while also showing how messy, imperfect, and human that resistance can be. People are tired. People make bad decisions. People need money. People crave belonging. People want to believe they are still good even when they are participating in something dangerous. That complexity is what keeps the novel from becoming a simple morality play. Madeline ffitch has written a novel that is wild, and deeply committed to the idea that collective life is worth fighting for, even when the people doing the fighting are flawed, frightened, funny, and just figuring it out as they go.

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