Dwelling: A Novel
Just finished this book, which got me with its premise: woman living in not-so-future dystopian New York City housing crisis moves to Texas to live in a shoe. The writing kept me reading, though this was a book that was a little outside of "weird girl" tropes and leaned more magical realism and fantasy than I normally read. Smart, funny, genuinely incredible prose. 4.75!
Summary: The world is ending. It has been ending for some time. When did the ending begin? Perhaps when Evie's mother died, or when her father died soon after. Perhaps when her sister, Elena, was forcibly institutionalized in a psychiatric hippie commune in Colorado. Certainly at some point over the last year, as New York City spun down the tubes, as bedbugs and vultures descended, as apartments crumbled to the ground and no one had the time or money to fight it, or even, really, to notice. And then, one day, the ending is complete. Every renter is evicted en masse, leaving only the landlords and owners--the demented, the aristocratic, the luckiest few. Evie--parentless, sisterless, basically friendless, underemployed--has nothing and no one. Except, she remembers, a second cousin in Texas, in a strange town called Gulluck, where nothing is as it seems. And so, in the surreal, dislodged landscape, beyond the known world, a place of albino cicadas and gardeners and thieves, of cobblers and shoemakers and one very large fish, a place governed by mysterious logic and perhaps even miracles, Evie sets out in search of a home.