Book Review: Unsheltered by Barbara Kingsolver

Normally, my reviews of anything Barbara Kingsolver writes are filled with superlatives. As I approached the end of this book, picked up by happenstance at the library, my only words were: brilliantly boring.

Boring isn’t exactly the right word … maybe normal? A perfect family … a perfectly imperfect family … with no happy ending in sight. 

 

Kingsolver skillfully skips back and forth between two families more than a hundred years apart, sharing only a town and a falling down house between them, never depending on the novelist’s grab bag of dramatic arcs to manipulate the tension. 

 

The metaphor of the lives of both families is a failing house deteriorating under the relentless assault of time with little hope of repair or renovation; a home that does not shelter and holds no hopes for the future.

Reading this book is like having coffee with a friend whose luck has been on a long-term downward slope: a train wreck in progress. It is an uneasy feeling, made worse by caring about your friend, but wishing you could just walk away or snap your finger for magic to appear. 

Kingsolver is not a Hollywood writer. 

You just know that no one is going to gallop in and save the day.  

So how will it end?

The ending begins in the middle of page 400, in a cemetery where a mother-daughter sit talking in a way that made me want to run away as the truth unfolded and I saw myself as both mother-daughter and as human being in the current state of our world. The next fourteen pages are some of the most honest I’ve ever read.

It wouldn’t be fair to even give a glimpse of their content. I just hope you don’t miss them.

For more of a detailed description of the Amazon Best Book of October, 2018:  In her insightful and politically charged new novel, Barbara Kingsolver finds deep resonances between the Victorian era’s attitudes towards science, and our own. Unsheltered begins on the eve of the 2016 presidential election, when Willa, a freelance journalist whose family has fallen on hard times, discovers that the house they’ve moved into has a “nonexistent foundation.” Hoping to enlist restoration help from a historical society, Willa traces the origins of the house to Thatcher Greenwood, a science teacher who lived there in the 1870s, and his neighbor, a real-life woman biologist named Mary Treat, whose research supported Charles Darwin’s theory of the origin of species. Just as Darwin’s theory challenged the Victorian belief in the Judeo-Christian creation myth, so too, in Willa’s era, does global warming challenge prevailing myths about the future of civilization. Kingsolver, whose 1998 novel The Poisonwood Bible was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, carries off this cleverly structured dual narrative with aplomb and with a certain degree of rage at charismatic politicians, both past and present, whose disregard for science puts humanity in peril. –Sarah Harrison Smith, Amazon Book Review

Book Challenge Day #4: Barbara Kingsolver

What thrills me most about Barbara Kingsolver … now at least ... is that I never know what to expect, but I always know it will be an interesting journey. I started reading her sometime after The Bean Trees came out in 1988 and drifted delightedly through Animal Dreams and Pigs in Heaven. I put her in a neat little box of authors I enjoyed. 

 

And then came The Poisonwood Bible and I didn’t know whether to put it on an altar or spit on it. It wasn’t what I signed up for when I bought the name Kingsolver.

However, after finishing it, I found myself thinking about the characters, thinking about the world they lived in and the challenges of living in such a different culture. Particular passages or events haunted me and still make me think about them. 

 

By the time I got through to Prodigal Summer, The Lacuna, and Animal, Vegetable, Miracle, I had stopped thinking about her as a name on a book, but rather as a woman who was thinking and writing about things that interested me. And then came Flight Behavior, a magical book. All I know now is that whatever she writes, I will read and be transported to a different place and informed about the world and all its wonders.

When I went to her website to write this post, I found some thoughts worth sharing:

"What keeps me awake at the wheel is the thrill of trying something completely new with each book. I’m not a risk-taker in life, generally speaking, but as a writer I definitely choose the fast car, the impossible rock face, the free fall.”

— Barbara Kingsolver

"Literature is one of the few kinds of writing in the world that does not tell you what to buy, want, see, be, or believe. It’s more like conversation, raising new questions and moving you to answer them for yourself.”

— Barbara Kingsolver

"The very least you can do in your life is to figure out what you hope for. The most you can do is live inside that hope, running down its hallways, touching the walls on both sides.” — from Animal Dreams