Fidget and the Second Insurrection

By J. Cochran

Spartacus meets Tropic Thunder as if channeled by Kurt Vonnegut

An orphaned young man is swept away by a group of misfits who eventually cause the second insurrection and finds comfort in what may be the only true family he will ever know.

Fidget and the Second Insurrection is a mainstream novel akin to Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole, and The Good Lord Bird by James McBride.

After running away from his fifth foster home at the age of seventeen, a young man with a touch of the autism is picked up by a kind stranger who looks like a withered stick with googly eyes pasted to his head. It is none other than Liberty Ordith; an unknown, uneducated and malnourished man raised by hippies. Liberty's kindness leads Fidget to believe that Liberty and his small band of misfits may be his only hope, mostly because Fidget has no one else and nowhere to turn. His journey begins.

Liberty Ordith's mission to "save America from itself" via a cross-country evangelistic mission (sans Jesus) turns into a movement in which many thousands of Americans starved for meaning and unity join up and travel across the US and into Canada, sick and tired of racial inequity, polarized politics and American hypocrisy. Fidget comes to love a much older, somewhat large woman named Smiley Sara, and battles Kenny Fucking Clay, a neophyte of Liberty who Fidget struggles and battles with until banishing Kenny from the fold in Canada, right before the descent the Capitol of the United States. Unlike the first insurrection, the second is quite bloody and well known to the reader. The second insurrection is also successful in healing America's wounds even though Liberty dies after falling over the corpse of a dog and most of his followers serve time in prison... except for Kenny Fucking Clay who is on all the morning talk shows after betraying "The Believer's Code" of Liberty's cause while the rest of Liberty's Army of America rot in prison. Or so Fidget believes.

As he faces his final appeal hearing because Fidget never harmed a soul, and with the help of his tutor and unknown protector, Fidget confronts the life and people he wants to be his family, having never had one before. He may not have the dream of family he always wanted, a father and mother, loved ones and strange relatives, but it might be better than anything he had before... if he can make it out of prison alive and see his family again.

J. Cochran is a lifelong writer with a graduate degree from City College of New York, and has won awards for fiction, non-fiction and poetry published in a wide array of journals and books. In an "almost won the lottery" aspect, he garnered three Pushcart nominations for short fiction. He also has two books published by small presses. J. Cochran is a single father who currently teaches creative writing and composition in his hometown of Tucson, Arizona, and got his own low-level autism diagnosis at the age of 48 after his son was diagnosed with the condition at an early age.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: B0C47W323Q
• ISBN13: 9798393799304
• Release Date: May 2023
• Publisher: Independently Published
• Length: 166 Pages
• Weight: 0.51 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.3" x 6.0" x 9.0"