Vida Asch is the center of [Vida]. Beautiful, passionate, capable, the most popular of the Upper West Side revolutionaries, Vida has been a fugitive for nearly 10 years now…. As the novel progresses we see how unreal Vida has become to those in the world she left behind. She no longer exists except inside the fugitive life. (p. 43)

We experience Vida's exhaustion and confusion, her yearning for rest and legality, for an end to a life she knows is merely survival. But, dominated by the stubborn determination like that of a patriotic prisoner of war not to be taken, not to give up or give in, not to let "them" win, she hunches her shoulders and disappears into the winter night: a resister to the end.

Piercy accomplishes two things in this novel. She evokes very affectingly the raw pull of revolutionary politics that took hold of so many...