Their histories collide when Willa investigates the background to the house. Her area of expertise is health and science his, a promulgator of Darwin’s theory of evolution. The comparisons start with Willa and Thatcher. And the definitive connection of chapters that end and begin with “Shelter in Place.” Others have more serious interpretations of The Treasure Chest of Time or Mr. Another, ending with a reference to an actual cake leads into a metaphorical analogy. A chapter which ends with a reference to the classical story of Scylla and Charybdis becomes the names of two dogs in the next one. This allows the chapters and the stories to be linked.įor instance, the opening chapter, “Falling House,” while establishing the overall theme of the novel, ends with “’We’re all beginners,’” which leads into chapter two, “Beginners,” about the early days of the house. 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.

Unsheltered by barbara kingsolver