I don't know how I managed to finish this book. I'm sure I wouldn't have if I wasn't so reluctant to write a DNF review and deal with the inevitable backlash (how can you possibly say you didn't like it when you didn't even finish it?!)Kingsolver's The Poisonwood Bible is a great book, IMO, and it's hard to believe the same well-respected author wrote something this didactic and heavy-handed. There were parts where I felt like the only thing that separated Unsheltered from being an essay was t...

This is the first book by this author that I did not finish, here's why.OK this was a huge disappointment for me but in hindsight I guess I should have seen it coming. I loved Kingsolver's earlier books but this one was just so political it was boring and tiring. I don't enjoy reading a book that makes me feel as though I'm being lectured to. I grew tired of the God vs evolution discussion, the health care, climate change etc etc etc.There is so much of all of this discussion in the news and eve...

4✚ 🐜 🐜 🐜 🐜If there was such a prize this one might win The Most Polarizing Novel of 2018. You will most likely be down there on the grass counting spiders with Mrs. Treat or staring at her from your window thinking she’s a crazy bug lady.I’m a huge BK fan but began this with some apprehension. A fair share of fans and friends did not find this a rewarding reading experience. I read several professional reviews after the fact and most were not singing praises or were downright unkind in their rem...

Unfortunately, I'm going to have to DNF this one for now. It's my first from the author, and from what I'm hearing from beloved fans, I need to pick up a different one and give it a shot. <3*Many thanks to the publisher for providing my copy.

3.5 stars I know when I read a Kingsolver book that it will most likely be about social issues, perhaps political too, so I wasn’t surprised. At first I thought there were maybe too many issues thrown in - affording to live, affording to die, health care, the environment, bigotry, and yes the politics of the day. A college closes and Willa Knox’s husband loses his tenured position and pension and they lose their home. The magazine she worked for went broke and she is forced to freelance. Iano ha...

Kingsolver has been my favorite author for decades, since The Bean Trees swept me away 30 years ago. With Unsheltered, she has given us another gem. The best novels, I believe, are those that defy easy description. Unsheltered is about shelter, which we find in structures, people, nature, and work. It’s about the discoveries of science that are often put up against the ideas of faith. It’s about today’s sad political climate in which our true climate, our Earth, is in crisis. And it’s about peop...

First of all, I want to shout out a word of thanks to the Goodreads FirstRead program and to the publisher, HarperCollins, for giving me the pleasure of becoming an early reader for one of my favored authors. You guys are the best!I’ve read most of Barbara Kingsolver’s books and the one thing I learned a while back is that you don’t go into her books without expecting a strong point of view. In an accompanying letter, Ms. Kingsolver writes, “What I know for sure is that stories will get us throu...

Kingsolver has nailed it again for me. Unsheltered was a confronting, absorbing, thoughtful read- a novel of our times. I’m predisposed to like this a lot for a number of reasons; most importantly that Kingsolver draws of some of my favourite narrative devices- parallel narratives, and the use of place as character. At some level, this is a novel about a house, crumbling without foundations. More importantly it is a novel about the significance of foundations in our lives; how we build and negle...

Welcome to The Big Book of Dialogues! I have never in my life read this big amount of unnecessary blabber between characters, I simply can’t believe that one experienced author could put all this in a novel and expect people to read it with excitement. Some of the topics that were discussed casually, during dinner or a simple walk around the neighborhood: molecules, unsustainable economy, Darwin’s theory, digestion of spiders, house reparations, Obamacare, insurance. All this lead nowhere! I was...

The simplest thing would be to tear it down,” the man said. “The house is a shambles.” You do the right thing. You go to school, spend the years, invest the money, put off this or that temporary form of glee, take on the debt, pay it off. Get a job at the bottom of the ladder, work X number of years and move up. There are mis-steps, of course, accidents, bad decisions, re-directions, disappointments. Some big, some less so, everyone has these. You get married, have children, be a solid citize

3.5 Upon my completion of this book, I was left with a serious conundrum. What do I rate this? I actually finished a few days ago, a read with Angela and Esil, and have been pondering that question throughout. One expects when reading Kingsolver to be confronted with her opinions, political, environmentally or something to do with the natural world. Here she gives us all three, in two different stories, ons in the past, one in the present. The connection being the house that is lived in that hap...

Here comes the first major novel to tackle the Trump era straight on and place it in the larger chronicle of existential threats. Kingsolver has constructed this book as two interlaced stories, separated by more than a century. The contemporary story in “Unsheltered” offers a collage of Democratic talking points acted out in the lives of a middle-class family slipping down the ladder of success. Ironically, the alternate chapters of “Unsheltered,” set in the 1870s, are fresher and more rewarding...

3+ starsI loved Barbara Kingsolver’s earlier books. But I haven’t loved her more recent books as much. She remains a good writer and still has deep insight into people and their complexities, but there’s an edge of preachiness to her writing that I find a bit jarring — even if I tend to agree with what she is preaching about.Unsheltered was yet another such book. Told in two timelines, Unsheltered tells the stories of people pushed out to the margins making do and forming communities. In the con...

The importance of keeping one's house in order despite a shaky foundation, deterioration and rot festering within the walls and overhead.  Can it even be done?  With little common ground, the broken pieces of lives lie just under the surface, waiting to emerge and injure again.    Preachy as hell, to the point of distraction.  Enough is enough, and too much is just foolish.  Say sorry, but a once favored author of mine has slipped into tepidity for me.  If not for the intriguingly tricky family

Barbara Kingsolver is a must-read author for me. I love her work, especially The Poisonwood Bible. At 466 pages, this is a long book, but I inhaled it. Kingsolver writes that she is explicitly addressing the events of her time, but she does that in part by looking back: her double narrative follows the life-changing decisions and uncertain times experienced by two separate families, one hundred years apart, who both live in the same home in Vineland, New Jersey. Kingsolver found one heck of a su...

I used to love Barbara Kingsolver's writing. The Poisonwood Bible, Bean Trees, and Animal Dreams are some of my favorite novels. But then she started getting very preachy, using her novels for what I interpret as authorial interjection. I feel lectured by her on a variety of subjects that must be close to her heart. In fact, many of her causes are close to my own heart. Despite this commonality of social consciousness and politics, that is not what I want to find in a novel. I want to be transpo...

I was looking forward to reading this book because I've loved several of Barbara Kingsolver's novels. Unfortunately I just couldn't find a connection to this one. I couldn't develop and depth of feeling for any of the characters nor with the plot, so definitely not a favorite for me.The writing was, of course, really good and Kingsolver's style shone through. The current story and the story set in the past segued well and were relevant easily to each other. The only character I really liked was

Full disclosure: I am a Barbara Kingsolver fan. Willa is supposed to "have it all." Married to a college professor, a writer herself, her children launched, life should be good...but it's not. Transplanted to New Jersey, she is jobless, her academic husband is wildly underemployed and her wayward daughter, her terminally ill, Archie Bunkerish father-in-law and an infant grandson who is NOT her daughter's child are all living under her roof. Roof barely covers it: the home, an inheritance, is a s...

Every time I start reading a book I love I find myself slowing down, setting the book down in the middle of a chapter, rereading a page or two, going back and reading an earlier chapter again—-doing anything, in short, in order to prolong the experience, to avoid the inevitable last page. That’s how I felt about Unsheltered.There is so much to admire about this book. The structure of the novel is brilliantly constructed. Kingsolver tells two stories, one in present day, and one just after the Ci...

Let's make it short and sweet. Jarring, tedious, boring, preachy, political rant disguised as a novel. A keyboard-warrior on steroids. I loved the author's earlier works. I simply could not finish this book as much as I tried. It was my last read of this author. This was a gigantic waste of valuable time. What an utter disappointment. Perhaps I've read, and still read, too many, and way more interesting and riveting non-fictional books on the chosen subjects in this book. One star rating = I did...