This is a must-read for New York transplants - newcomers to any city really - who want to support their new community rather than displace it. His academic background comes through in his integration of psychoanalysis, sociopolitical theory, and queer theory. But these forces are being challenged by many of the groups Moss describes so lovingly. Feral City is often exuberant, but the reading experience is bittersweet, knowing that the city is by and large rushing past the freedom of that “feral” moment and back to soaring rents and inhumane policing.

Moss describes a complicated ambivalence as he bikes from neighborhood to neighborhood, reveling in the sense of unity and resilience, while grieving for everything and everyone lost. The New People flee, the others stay, and the New Yorkers who truly consider the city home reclaim it. When 2020 hits and the city goes into lockdown, something changes. In the 20-odd years since, he’s watched as his home turned hostile, distorting to accommodate the super-wealthy “hypernormal” transplants - he calls them New People - and sterilizing everything that made the city open, liberating, and a haven for outsiders. Jeremiah Moss arrived in the East Village in the early 1990s as a transgender man searching for his people. It’s a story told by the person who owns it, from a point in time where he’s able to understand just how precarious the endeavor was and how afraid his family must have been. He’s created something quite rare here - an account of the high-stakes journey to a better life as experienced, moment to moment, by one of the most vulnerable travelers. It’s a journey that would test anyone’s mettle, let alone that of a child on his own, but during those seven weeks Zamora sees some of the best humanity has to offer: solidarity, bravery, sacrifice. His vulnerability, yearning, insecurities, and hope are vivid. Choosing to tell a childhood story from the perspective at the time can go horribly wrong, but Zamora nails the tone and mind-set of his youth. Solito reads like a diary of the trek, recounting the strange, immediate intimacy born from sharing the experience with other immigrants, the physical and emotional toll of daily slogs through dangerous terrain and waters, the disorientation of never really knowing who to trust. On April 6, 1999, 9-year-old Javier Zamora traveled with his grandfather from his home in El Salvador to Guatemala, where his grandfather would say good-bye and send him off on a seven-week journey to his parents in San Francisco.

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