![]() ![]() ![]() This isn’t helped by the novel’s structure of alternating chapters - in one we’re in 2016, in the next we’re in the 1870s – and neither storyline is given a chance to thrive. And sadly none of its characters are interesting enough to breathe life into the whole. Sounds promising, perhaps, but the problem is that Unsheltered toys with too many issues – climate change, populism, waste, student loans, the survival of the fittest, the decline of print media – and doesn’t give any of them enough air. It is centred round two parallel families, one 19th-century and one present-day, who are living in the same crumbling house, falling apart because it was built without a solid foundation. Unsheltered is set in Vineland, an actual New Jersey town that was founded as a utopian, alcohol-free community in the 1860s by a dodgy property developer (and later murderer) called Charles Landis. But does that mean we can compare that era with our own? It’s also a time, post Civil War, when the country is ruptured and “its wounds lie open and ugly”. ![]()
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