UNSHELTERED

by Barbara Kingsolver
 
Unsheltered is the best book I’ve read in a very long time!  I can’t recommend it highly enough.  Barbara Kingsolver is a master storyteller who creates sympathetic characters.  Her dialogue is as realistic and believable as any I’ve ever read.
 
In Unsheltered we meet Willa Knox and her husband as they approach mid-life. They’ve worked diligently and followed all of society’s rules, but find themselves without jobs. She’s been laid off from her magazine and he lost his tenured position when his college closed. They move into an old house that she inherited, only to find that it needs massive amounts of work.  Their unconventional 26-year-old daughter shows up after living in Cuba for years.  Their more establishment-type son finds himself a single father struggling with college debt and a new baby.  And so Willa’s life becomes something very different from what she had imagined.
 
Amidst the upheaval in her life, Willa begins to investigate their new house’s history.  This becomes the second story line that Kingsolver gives us: that of Thatcher Greenwood, a newly married science teacher who lived in this very house a century earlier and taught in the community’s only school.  It turns out this had been a planned Utopian community with a very strong-willed leader. Among his many defects, he forbade the teacher to make any mention of Darwin’s natural selection as well as many other scientific facts.  In response to this agonizing work environment, as well as the domestic pressures at home, Greenwood forges a memorable and life-saving relationship with his eccentric botanist neighbor.
 
I’m not sure which of the two story lines I loved the most.  But Kingsolver seamlessly weaves the two stories together and the result is a very rich, wonderful book.  Give this one as a Christmas gift!  But make sure to get a copy for yourself. (Liz)