A year or so ago, a lot of women I don’t know started trying to sell me soft pants. Some of the pants had elastic waists, some drawstring; some were cotton, some linen, some silk; some of them came in practical neutrals, some in pleasing popsicle shades of blue and red. Not a single pair cost less than $100.

I put myself in the line of this marketing, to be clear. I was on a hunt. After my daughter was born, I longed for my old wardrobe, which consisted mainly of rigid vintage denim, but I had a sore Cesarean-section scar and a waistline that changed every two weeks. Once the jeans became available to me again, I discovered—and yes, I fought this—that they were incorrect for my new life. Building block towers on the floor is fun, but less so if you’re doing it in tight Levi’s 501s. What I needed were some loose clothes that read stylish yet practical. I didn’t have time to go shopping in person, so I started Googling, which led me to a swarm of clothing-focused Substacks that catered to moms.

Still, when I started seeing the same pants in the newsletters, on my Instagram feed, in the targeted ads that hound me from website to website, and in a Cut piece about how stylish moms dress, it threw me. On the one hand, the ubiquity of the pants was validating: I was relieved that my closet issues weren’t mine alone. On the other hand, the vision was so uniform. It was, in fact, a uniform. I’d gone in search of a wardrobe that worked for playdates and playgrounds and days when I go straight from work to an evening of child care, and what I found was an emerging archetype of the Cool Millennial Mom.

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A Cool Millennial Mom has a small child or two. She probably lives in Brooklyn or Los Angeles, though she could be in another city or picturesque suburb. She generally has a job, but either she’s self-employed or her role is accommodating enough that she’s the parent in charge of school drop-off. Maybe she can even go to Pilates afterward, though she’s just as likely to head to a meeting. She has a lot of work and—if she’s not in the office—a lot of errands to get done, and she wants to be comfortable yet put together. Besides, she has to be presentable enough that, if the mood is right, she and her partner can take their kids out to a casual dinner rather than cooking; after all, this mom wasn’t home all day in an apron. She was running around in an expensive sweater and a chic pair of tie-waist pants. She is busy, and busyness, I have come to realize, is core to both the aesthetic and the deeper promise of the Cool Millennial Mom.

I’m inventing this woman, but not entirely. She appears, either as an online persona or a categorizable type, in the newsletters of women with anywhere from a few thousand to 32,000 subscribers. She is featured on blogs. She is especially well embodied by the social-media persona of Alyssa Wasko Stein. Wasko Stein, who lives in Los Angeles, is the founder and designer of Donni, the clear leader of the expensive-soft-pants-selling pack (and the subject of the aforementioned Cut article). Although the company’s least expensive pair of pants is $144, I see them routinely in the wild. Also, I’ve bought them. Wasko Stein herself dresses very stylishly, in her own designs, and posts Instagram stories and carousels that beguile me with the appealing range of her weekly routine: Here she is dressing models at a shoot, here cuddling her daughter, here having Shabbat dinner. Her life, as she displays it, is an optimal advertisement for the clothes she creates.

Wasko Stein’s online presence—heavy on recommendations for niche luxuries such as Belgian shoes—also models a sense of being in the know. This is core to the idea of the cool mom; she is a woman who, as the newsletter writer and fashion journalist Maura Brannigan has put it, wears “interesting shoes to the playground” and has “good taste in both children’s books and literary fiction.”

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Developing this taste takes time, energy, and an impulse toward eclecticism, which contrasts noticeably with other archetypes of motherhood: the prairie-dressed tradwife; the Mean Girls mom with her Juicy velour and cement-solid boob job; the corporate working mother trying to “have it all” in a power suit. The Cool Millennial Mom wants to have it all in another way entirely. The ideal here is of a rewarding, varied life whose parts, disparate though they are, interlock seamlessly. It’s a demanding goal, which is why she needs a versatile wardrobe. A pencil skirt is no good for coaching soccer practice; a calico dress isn’t right for a meeting; loungewear doesn’t work at a gallery. With some clever styling, though, the cool-mom pants can look right—and be comfortable—everywhere.

Of course, “clever styling” is not, in fact, effortless, even if your clothes and shoes are meant to seem as if you just tugged and kicked them on. Getting the cool-mom look right requires dedication; not for nothing does Donni teach its shoppers how to tie a shirt around their waist. When a sweater doesn’t drape right or the tie-waist pants sit too low, the look swiftly becomes disheveled or, worse, pajama-esque. The aesthetic of busyness suggests striving unrelated to clothing, but the look requires, at baseline, the exertion of learning which pants are cool, earning enough to buy them, and then wearing them such that they don’t seem like scrubs.

If it sounds like I’m making fun, perhaps I am a little, with affection. Every generation, or even every micro-generation, probably gets its own hard-to-attain and easily mockable ideal of the cool mom, and I’m glad enough that this is mine. Most mothers I know, myself included, want and endeavor for lives that can accommodate all the parts of ourselves, the ones we cultivated before having children and the ones that emerge as our kids’ personalities do. And yes, all right, we can be just as vain as we might have been pre-parenthood: We want to lead our full, overwhelming, multifaceted lives in good pants.

Villains, in 21st-century literature, are hard to come by. Very few novelists write real Bad Guys or build their books around clear struggles between good and evil—and with reason. Such storylines, when executed poorly, can easily become didactic; a villain can turn into a cartoon. Yet some of the most satisfying stories out there, the ones that people have adapted and retold for centuries, are tales of good versus evil: Paradise Lost, Le Morte d’Arthur, a decent chunk of the Brothers Grimm.

As recently as the mid-20th century, literary novelists were still writing evil characters: “Big Bads,” we might call them. Yet the gap between the sinister Cathy in John Steinbeck’s East of Eden and the somewhat redeemed version—the girl boss of the brothel, as The New Yorker’s Alexandra Schwartz recently put it—in Zoe Kazan’s new Netflix adaptation indicates that writers are leery of villains now. Reading the canon suggests that this might foreclose on a rich vein of drama and meaning. So does reading the distinctly contemporary work of the Appalachian writer Madeline ffitch.

ffitch is a longtime environmental activist, and her 2019 debut novel, Stay and Fight, follows three women raising a child off the grid in eastern Ohio while battling a natural-gas company that becomes their nemesis. Still, though the company has a slimy functionary, it’s essentially an impersonal version of evil. But in her newly released follow-up, Avalon, Rise, ffitch gives her villain a face and a voice.

The novel is again set in Appalachian Ohio, in a small town where an internet-famous neo-Nazi has just moved. Its characters have to struggle against not only the extremist herself, but also her quickly spreading influence, while still dealing with their preexisting troubles, which include isolation, addiction, and one mother’s seeming compulsion to hit her child. These are serious matters—and yet some of the clearest influences in Avalon, Rise are children’s books. In fact, Pete Seeger’s Abiyoyo, the tale of a boy and his father who save their village from a giant, seems to be the book’s guiding star.

Avalon, Rise is a sophisticated novel, intellectually complex and slyly funny at every turn. Like Abiyoyo, it is also a very direct story about facing evil with courage. Avalon, Rise makes the case on nearly every page that opposing the Big Bad is necessary. But that basic principle, the book suggests, does not make standing up to those who would destroy a community easy. Indeed, the ever-shifting balance between clarity and complication is central to the novel.

ffitch is able to maintain this balance largely because she seems to have little interest in demonstrating purity—either her own or that of her characters. Avalon, Rise doesn’t care if its characters do the precisely correct thing. As a result, it achieves the rare feat of having a distinct sense of right and wrong, without ever becoming preachy or heavy-handed. It becomes an exploration of how confusing and hard it is to be good.

Abiyoyo is set in a village united, as one of Avalon, Rise’s characters puts it, by annoyance and fear. The annoyance is at the dad and son, who are such inconsiderate neighbors that the town exiles them; the fear is of Abiyoyo, a perhaps-mythical man-eating giant. But when Abiyoyo actually shows up one morning, the ostracized father-son duo comes up with a clever strategy to defeat him, saving the town and redeeming themselves in the process. All of these plot points—and really, these characters—appear in ffitch’s novel.

In Avalon, Rise, the village is Avalon, Ohio, which seems to be loosely based on the real town of Athens. Its menacing giant is white nationalism, embodied by a true believer named Stasia—the “Volk Mother” or “OdinistMama” online—who moves to Avalon and begins recruiting in its community. But rather than having one parent and a child to defeat the villain, ffitch fills Avalon, Rise with a sprawling, endearing, enraging group of characters who are, if not outcasts, distinctly at the town’s margins.

There’s Avalon’s social worker, who holds herself a bit apart from the community she serves; there’s the wishy-washy librarian who, by trying to agree with everyone she talks with, ends up going back constantly on her word; there are the anti-fascist organizers with bad attitudes and too many piercings. Over the course of the novel, which has the conviction of a manifesto but the relaxed, raucous narrative quality of a good shaggy-dog story, ffitch gets all of these characters to come together to deal not only with Stasia but also with the residents of Avalon who are willing, and in some cases eager, to enable her.

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Stasia’s leading enabler, Woody, is, perhaps counterintuitively, also Avalon, Rise’s moral center. What I mean is that he’s the character who struggles the hardest. He is a printmaker and an addict (any reader who was disappointed, as I was, by Barbara Kingsolver’s Demon Copperhead will get a more nuanced and less dramatic portrait of drug addiction in Appalachia here). His prized possession is a milk crate of children’s books—including, pointedly, Abiyoyo—that he refers to regularly as sources of artistic inspiration, comfort during withdrawal, entertainment for his 4- and 7-year-old nephews, and guidance for when he doesn’t know what to do.

Woody gets sucked into Stasia’s orbit after she commissions him to print flyers for her “European Heritage Rug Braiding” workshops. Stasia’s barn contains an old Vandercook, a 20th-century printing press that Woody reveres so much that he has “memorized its anatomy.” ffitch, who loves detailed terminology, luxuriates in Woody’s pleasure at just knowing “there was such thing as a half-­pica lever, a sliding knee stick, a slug cutter, a cylinder eccentric,” let alone using them. Stasia allows him access to the press, and dangles the possibility of giving it to him. In Woody’s imagination, owning it would give him a real life as an artist, which, in turn, might help him stay clean. This desire, along with his addiction itself, makes him highly susceptible to Stasia’s manipulation, even as his mother and best friend lead very different efforts to organize against her.

Woody’s mother, Eloise, is Avalon’s people-pleasing librarian, a lifelong liberal activist who believes in civil discourse above all. On Stasia’s arrival, though, her commitment to this value is immediately shaken by the more forceful resistance proposed by the novel’s ragtag group of anti-fascists, which includes Woody’s childhood best friend, Leroi—a sweet, earnest mama’s boy who dreams of getting out of Avalon and becoming a vagabond. The novel’s goals include bringing its Lerois and its Eloises together, prodding them to collaborate despite their many disagreements.

[Read: A biting satire about the idealistic left]

But the novel’s deeper effort is to use political work—an “ordinary and necessary” part of life, ffitch has written—and the dissidence and quandaries it creates, to ask that each of its characters be brave in their own way. In every case, this means dealing with Stasia. For Woody, it also means reckoning with addiction, and for Eloise, recognizing that her desire to be a nonjudgmental mother has led her to facilitating his drug abuse.

For Eloise’s older child, Emma, who has two young sons, it means admitting something even harder. ffitch is uncommonly good at writing, tenderly but without sentimentality, about people who both adore their children and make colossal errors in raising them. Emma, especially where her 7-year-old son, Martin, is concerned, falls into this category. Of their dynamic, ffitch writes, “Emma loved Martin helplessly. Yet, just as helplessly, she wanted to hit him”—and she does. It’s only toward the end of the book that Emma admits that hitting her son isn’t a maternal instinct but rather a sign that she, herself, needs significant help.

By braiding these stories, and many more, into the tale of Avalon defeating its giant, ffitch tells a layered, sophisticated story that expresses a clear, ethical point of view without hammering readers on the head. Not many novels for adults do this successfully, but in children’s literature, it is one of the standards for a great book. ffitch includes many in Avalon, Rise: Abiyoyo but also Frog and Toad, Herschel and the Hanukkah Goblins, The Dead Bird. Each of these books demands that its characters face their situation with courage; each one takes something that seems simple—burying a bird, celebrating Hanukkah, all sorts of mundane tasks in Frog and Toad—and surrounds it with not just emotional complication but also mischief, humor, and delight.

So, too, with Avalon, Rise, as it demonstrates that white supremacists are unwelcome in town. What Avalon, Rise understands as well as the classics of children’s literature is that when you’re a small, fallible, confused person, everything is exciting but almost nothing is easy. What it understands as well as any great adult novel is how hard it is to get people to work together, no matter how high the stakes. In bringing these two clear yet complicated pieces of knowledge together, ffitch has written a remarkable book.