In the fall of 2014, educators Eric and Rixa Freeze moved with their young family to Old Nice, a medieval town-within-a-city on the famed Côte d’Azur. They’d bought a 700-square-foot dive, an apartment in need of renovation just a couple blocks from the Mediterranean. They were a family with a plan: to live differently. No home in the suburbs with a two-car garage, no bedroom for every child, no 24- hour Walmart. Carefully researched and vividly written, French Dive chronicles the Freeze family’s integration into a culture where large families aren’t all treated alike. What they find—spearfishing for food, renting their car to strangers, fixing and selling old furniture from the garbage depot—is that a city gives back the more you give to it. Morally complex, unflinching in its analysis of contemporary life and the things that keep human beings apart, Freeze tackles racism, homelessness, art, reality TV, social media,…