Stylistically, each chapter ends with a word or two that becomes the title of the next chapter. Kingsolver’s narrative structure allows each character’s story to be told in alternating chapters. In 2016, the year of a transformative presidential election, it is the home that shelters Willa Knox, a journalist in her mid-fifties, her husband, Iano Tavoularis, a college professor of global politics, and their extended family-their daughter, son, his newborn, and an ailing parent. In the late nineteenth century, in what was the “tittle tattle village” of Vineland, New Jersey, the house in question at the corner of Sixth and Plum was owned by Thatcher Greenwood, a high school science teacher. She takes a seemingly easy metaphor-a house in shambles-and mines it for its rich personal, historical, and political assets. Barbara Kingsolver’s 19th book of fiction (after Flight Behavior, 2012), the exhilarating Unsheltered, is a study in comparisons, contrasts, and changes.
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