are feeling these days - cheated out of a future that was never really owed us to begin with and exhausted from attempting to get others to understand how we see the world. This dual storyline has the potential to be gimmicky, but Kingsolver makes certain that it isn't, especially as the parallels between the time periods and families are not overt, and it's only over time that we connect them. It is also about a family living on the same plot of land some 150 years prior. Worst of all for Willa, there is no easy solution to these woes.īut Unsheltered isn't only about Willa and her family during the 2015-2016 primary season, when our current president - then a candidate Willa calls 'the Bullhorn' - was shocking many with his success. People aren't retiring because they can't afford to progeny are moving back in with their parents multigenerational households are increasingly common. What Willa and Iano were promised - that they would be rewarded for hard work, that sacrifices like moving their kids around for Iano's teaching positions would be worth it - has not come to pass. The Week's Best Stories From NPR Books From Kingsolver, The Fiction Of A Split Psyche But more dramatic tragedy strikes when Willa and Iano's son Zeke calls weeping: his girlfriend Helene has just died by suicide, leaving Zeke and their newborn alone and adrift. Willa's mother and aunt died in the past year, her adult daughter, Tig, recently returned from a long stint in Cuba and has moved back in, and Iano's diabetic and increasingly grumpy father Nick is living with them too. Willa, named for author Cather, is a journalist and editor whose magazine was recently shuttered, and her son-of-Greek-immigrants husband Iano had a nice tenure track position in Virginia until his school closed he's now back to adjuncting for little pay. Unsheltered opens with a slew of disappointments: There's the ho-hum tragedy of middle-class life in our contemporary U.S.

It is incredibly relevant, painfully familiar, gorgeously written - plus, there's a mother-daughter relationship at its center that so perfectly encapsulates a particular middle class, largely white generational divide that it could be used as a teaching tool for Baby Boomer parents and their Millennial children across the nation. I finally found those elusive moments recently and dug into Kingsolver's newest novel, Unsheltered. How?įor years now, my mother has been a fan of Barbara Kingsolver's work, urging me to read it when I had time. Your purchase helps support NPR programming.

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