Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

Barbara Kingsolver’s new novel “Unsheltered”, explores two different times in our country’s history from the viewpoint of family; present day and the 1870s, set in the same neighborhood in Vineland, New Jersey. It’s an interesting premise – looking at all our current ethos and pathos juxtaposed with the country in the aftermath of the Civil War. Kingsolver intends to explore what we use to provide us different types of shelter: our physical homes, family, country, religion, science, political ideology, etc. We strive to shelter ourselves from storms; actual weather storms, but also the storms of whatever the prevailing zeitgeist is – cultural shifts, family tragedies, financial crises, political changes, war, peace, feast, famine - you name it. In her view, to live "unsheltered" is to be free. Where I had trouble was in understanding protagonist, Willa Knox. I don’t have to like a character, but I have to have been shown enough to understand her point of view, and she was so irritatingly inconsistent for me, that I wonder if that was intentional. Kingsolver is too good of a writer not to have intended Willa to be problematic. Here is a woman who wishes her own grandson had never been born and wishes her father in law would die – in both cases because they (Aldus and Nick) are inconvenient and problematic for her; they seem to have no inherent value as individual human beings. Thus, the oldest and the youngest characters get the least respect. How is that a progressive ideal? Willa attempts to justify her meanness towards Nick because he’s a jerk, and her vindictiveness and complete lack of compassion just made me dislike her all the more. Willa sneers at the utopian ideals of the town of Vineland’s (a real place) founding father, Charles Landis (stand-in for Trump), even though these ideals included racial equality, education, and women’s suffrage. Is it because to people like Willa, if it’s old it’s bad, or if you don't like the guy whose got the ideas then the ideas don't matter? Is it fair to sneer at people who were trying to HELP “feeble-minded” children, just because that’s a Politically Incorrect term today? Willa likes animals, nature, and history, but not so much her fellow humans. So we are supposed to see the parallels between American society in the 1870s (reconstruction, the adverse reaction to Darwin’s Theory of Evolution) and today (financial crisis/1%, high medical costs, adverse reactions to Climate Science), but all I could see was that BOTH “sides” and “eras” are full of jerks, and science deniers, thus I found it all mostly tiresome. In her last novel, “Flight Behavior”, I lauded Kingsolver for the kindness and sympathy she showed to the characters whose opinions and ideals she clearly does not embrace. She may have (gently) shown their opinions to be wrong, but she also showed us WHY they felt the way they did. I found that perspective missing in “Unsheltered”. Coda: Interesting thing to notice: the last words of each chapter become the next chapter's title, and then it all wraps around at the end; nice nod to history, continuity, and evolution.