Matt Shaw is an idealistic high school teacher in a Portland, Oregon school characterized by diversity and poverty.  He wants to make a difference in the lives of kids at risk.  As a 30-ish first-year teacher he’s unsure of his abilities, and also of his commitment to a teaching career, even as he’s mentored by his mother, Rose, and stepfather, Chris.  
 
Freedom Lies is the third novel featuring Chris, Kevin, and Jill, the main characters from To The Other Side and An Actor Out on Loan, who all now live in Portland.  Also important are Rose and her aging mother Iris.  The events occur in the middle of the Obama administration, 2011 – 2014. 
 
Russ Baker made a fortune in biotech, a founder of a company that developed a medication helping bipolar patients.  He spreads his wealth to other worthy causes: the environment, cycling, literature, and education.  He’s a school reformer whose ideas about good education echo reform policies pushed by national education authorities. 

Matt has found that the practice of these policies in classrooms often keeps kids from learning what they most need.  As Russ initiates more aggressive reforms in the school system, he becomes the antagonist of Matt and Chris.  As a major supporter of cycling, Russ is a friend and ally of Kevin, for whom he funds cycling programs. 
 
Ginny is Kevin’s younger daughter and the college roommate of Matt’s girlfriend – she’d introduced them.  Ginny takes a job in Russ’s foundation, though she’s no more interested in philanthropy than in journalism, her college major.  But she’d been laid off from a lucrative job in high tech and out of work for months.  Eventually she gets more involved in Russ’s businesses, which include a rare earth metal mine in southeast Oregon.  She likes Russ and appreciates what he offers her as a boss and mentor.  But as she learns about the operation of the mine, she thinks he’s compromised his environmental ideals.       

American culture has always maintained a tension between individualism and the common good.  Each is a source of our country’s strength, but in recent decades the balance between them has grown seriously out of whack.  And it’s getting worse. 
 
Freedom Lies explores this tension.  Matt and Chris are fighting reformers who want to improve education by raising standards, and by measuring progress through quantitative testing.  Their goal is to prepare young people for the work force in a competitive world where many struggle to find meaningful work.  
 
What’s wrong with that, you ask?  I did too, when I began research.  In my first look at the reform movement, I found it sensible.  Then I read more and talked with educators about it.  Reformers’ goals sounded great, but their tactics could cause students’ critical thinking to atrophy, and many corporate reformers were less idealistically motivated than they appeared.  The deeper I studied the reforms, the more my evaluation changed.  I realized I could show both sides from their own perspective, even if my own sympathies had shifted from one to the other side. 
 
The trilogy as a whole is a saga about the last fifty years of American life, through characters involved in the personal, political, social, and financial issues of our time. 
 
After Freedom Lies, how can I avoid writing about what’s happening in our country now?