A review by angelayoung
Unsheltered by Barbara Kingsolver

5.0

As you'd expect from Barbara Kingsolver Unsheltered tackles big themes: housing and potential homelessness, climate change, demagogues and the origin of species and that's not all. But she does it with such lucid simplicity and such great storytelling, that I absorbed all she's saying beneath the stories without once feeling lectured, hectored or bullied into paying attention. A talent I admired in Flight Behaviour and The Poisonwood Bible too. And I discovered something of American life in a small town juxtaposed between two centuries. And the modern-day heroine has a Greek husband and so I also discovered what all Greeks know in their bones: that to swear often and in overtly sexual terms is a form of endearment, especially to a loved-one. The things you discover through fiction ... .

Unsheltered tells a twenty-first century story of a family and a house, and a nineteenth-century story of a family and (the same) house. In the nineteenth century the head of the family, Thatcher Greenwood, often escapes to his neighbour's house. The neighbour, Mary Treat, is a naturalist who corresponded with Darwin. Here's one of Thatcher's and Treat's conversations:

'How can we have creatures here that are not found in Europe and Asia, given that all began their progress from the Mountains of Ararat? With the help of bridges made by archangels, he [Professor Cutler] says. We need only look to the great Professor Cutler [who will go head-to-head with Thatcher on the subject] to answer all questions, using scripture bent back on itself like a fish hook.'
'And he knows nothing of modern thinking on the age of the earth? Has he not even read Charles Lyell?'
'He reads next to nothing. It might interfere with his knowledge of the universe.'

And in the twenty-first century, Tig intervenes in a conversation that threatens to turn into an argument between her mother, Willa, and her not-at-all-well and always-opinionated grandfather Nick about climate change, which he doesn't believe is happening:

'Rotation ... earth went a little off maybe.'
Willa shot a sideways glance at Tig, expecting a smirk, seeing something like physical pain. Of course this wasn't funny, watching a man struggle so hard for a lucid claim on his perennially illogical world.
'Or this other thing ... guy onna radio ... it's fish. All get together one part of the ... ocean. Stirs up the hurricanes.'
Willa's sympathy ruptured into laughter. 'Oh, Come on.'
'Scientific fact,' Nick assured her.

And then there's more discussion of fish and the earth slipping on its axis and where carbon goes when we burn petroleum. And Nick says,

'You don't know who's right. You can't say.'
'Yeah Papu, actually you can,' Tig piped up suddenly. 'There's a rule about that. It's called Occam's razor.'
'What?' he craned his neck around to look at Tig, suddenly at full attention. Willa felt acutely envious. This is what came of picking your battles.
'When there's a lot of different explanations for something,' Tig said slowly and loudly in the manner of a teacher for the hearing impaired, 'including supernatural and voodoo, you have to go with the simplest one. You look at just the evidence, nothing extra thrown in, and then go with simple.'
Nick shook his head. 'Nah ... don't see that.'
'Yes you do. Like, we're looking at white horse out in a field. You say Tig, maybe that's a hologram being projected by aliens. Maybe it's a zebra somebody painted white. Occam's razor says, cut the crap. It's a horse.'

See what I mean about lucid simplicity and great storytelling?