Seventeen-year-old heroine Angela Jones meets a nineteen-year-old activist named Fabio during the Occupy Wall Street protest in September 2011. Together with three other homeless teenagers, they "occupy" a vacant commercial building in Brooklyn's disadvantaged Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood. Over the course of five months, they transform Freedom House into a teen homeless shelter.

When Bank of America obtains a court-ordered eviction notice, Fabio and the other teenagers decide to use automatic weapons to prevent the police from evicting them. Determined to stop the eviction by nonviolent means, Ange reaches out to the African American church across the street.

The police arrive to find the church has mobilized seventy-five community members to commit civil disobedience by blocking access to the building. Meanwhile Ange is one of four residents standing at the front windows with an M16.

I'm a 66 year psychiatrist, single mother and activist who emigrated from Seattle to New Zealand in 2002. This followed fifteen years of intensive personal harassment by the U.S. government for my political activities. I write about this in my recent memoir The Most Revolutionary Act: Memoir of an American Refugee.