Recent college graduate Tom Hardy's ambitions include job security. But the United States has exchanged a democratic government model for one of Marxist socialism, so the way to ensure such is to belong to the nation's single Marxist Socialist Party. Tom is the ideal Party member, so eager to please government officials that he denounced his capitalist parents as a teenager, sending them to a gulag in Alaska. Then beautiful cosmopolitan cynic Izzy Fanella catches his attention and sets out to recruit him to the underground resistance movement whose freethinking adherents oppose Party ideology. Tom's political persuasion collides with his fascination with Izzy as their relationship progresses. He becomes more confident in his subversion when he learns that his boss in the Party, Buddy Lemmon, privately shares Izzy's views. The two colleagues are also connected to Izzy in a darker way that may undermine their joint efforts to banish repression.

Lighthearted romantic banter weaves artfully through this scathing criticism of Marxist socialism. Hejna presents the theoretical inverse of racial oppression of people of color as whites, now redesignated Euros, become the marginalized people whom members of other races secretly pity. Tom's initial wholesale acceptance of Party propaganda justifies Izzy's cynicism and later reveals his naivete when he realizes that his efforts to protect his parents from government retaliation actually expedited their deportation to the gulag. Even Tom's name, Thomas Hardy, seems an homage to the freeing beauty of creative thought and the power of individual outcry against social injustice. Meanwhile, the first names of his parents, John and Jane, denote the anonymity of the oppressed masses under totalitarian regimes. Staunch conservatives especially may enjoy this book's account of an eventual return by the United States to a representative democracy. Buyers for secondary school civics curricula may also wish to purchase this text.

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