Reviews with content warning for Terminal illness - Unsheltered

Content Warnings: Racism, Misogyny, Suicide, Miscarriage, Ableism, Multiple forms of slurs, Terminal illness, Animal Death, Fatphobia, Medical Content, Injury Detail, Loss of a Loved One, Grief

Another very conflicted read of mine. While I absolutely loved one of the characters (even though it seems like she was meant to be annoying?) there where many very critical problems with how themes came across and how certain parts where written.

Barbara has a lot of unchecked ableism and fatphobia, both have deeply seeped into this book in most of it's chapters. They're not used as a conversation starter or similar, they're just slipped in as part of the author's own views in all honesty. Nothing makes that more clear than the incredibly random comment about Mary being possibly on the spectrum. A character who is based on a real human!!

Reading between the lines, Willa wondered if maybe Mary was on the spectrum. But so loveable! Not a disney princess but a kind of natural-history savant, seemingly able to forget human cravings and immerse herself in the nonhuman lives around her.

And no, I don't believe this is brought up any further times, or given any additional context. Honestly absolutely disgusting this part and absolutely should have been edited out. It doesn't even make any sense whatsoever.

Additionally there's one character who's a full-on right-wing white supremacist conservative, and spouts some absolutely horrific shit constantly throughout the book, and yet we're seemingly supposed to feel sympathy for him, to just excuse his "old man on a death bed" ramblings because it's what he likes and he's on his way out.
Which, to put it bluntly, is pretty bullshit. Heavy bigoted politics like that very much hurts future generations. Indulging in people like that, who very much do exist in the real world, just because they're old/frail/on their deathbed doesn't matter. They still vote, they still rally, they still donate. Their actions 100% have a knock-on effect for everyone else around them. So no, I felt nothing for that character personally.

The history of the house was an interesting tale though. The mixture of historical and modern and how both sides slowly got more and more interwoven as the story progressed was really fascinating to read about.
It's a shame that it's a very slow burn, for not much payoff however. Characters didn't really seem to change terribly much by the end, and it was mainly only the historical PoV which had any substantial ending.

Tig rocks though. Love Tig! Literally is the main reason why it's as high as a 2.25 star lmao.

Content Warnings