Shelter in Place
A Novel
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3.0 • 2 Ratings
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- $2.99
Publisher Description
A troubled young man's bright future takes a strange turn when his mother commits murder in this "riveting and disturbing novel" of 1990s Washington State (The Guardian).
A Guardian and San Francisco Chronicle Best Book of 2016.
Joseph March, a twenty-one-year-old working-class kid from Seattle, is on top of the world. He has just graduated college and his limitless future beckons. But Joe's life suddenly implodes when he starts to suffer from the symptoms of bipolar disorder. Then, not long after, his mother kills a man she's never met with a hammer.
Joe moves to White Pine, Washington, where his mother is serving time and his father has set up house. Followed there by his girlfriend, Tess Wolff, Joe's life falls into a daily rhythm of prison visits followed by beer and pizza at a local bar. Meanwhile, Joe's mother, Anne-Marie, is gradually becoming a local heroine. Many see her crime as a furious, exasperated act of righteous rebellion. Tess, too, has fallen under her spell. Spurred on by Anne-Marie's example, Tess enlists Joe in a secret, violent plan that will forever change their lives.
Shelter in Place is a stylish novel about the hereditary nature of mental illness, the fleeting intensity of youth, the obligations of family, and the dramatic consequences of love.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Finding peace and learning to deal with the consequences of one's actions are just two of the many thematic currents pulsing through Maksik's scorching third novel (after A Marker to Measure Drift). Set in various towns throughout the Pacific Northwest and hurtling back and forth in time from the early 1990s to the present, the bleak story is narrated by Joe March, whose mother, Anne-Marie, is sent to jail in 1991 when Joe is 20. Around the same time, Joe meets Tess the love of his life and after a period of brief separation, the two move to White Pine, Wash., where the prison is located. Anne-Marie's crime hammering a man to death in a grocery store parking for abusing his wife soon attracts the admiration of female followers (including Tess) who have "run out of patience" and "have reached their limit" of what they'll accept from men. In the second half of the book, Tess hatches a plot to punish a wife-beating neighbor and involves Joe, allowing Maksik to deliver a portrait of Joe's bipolar disorder which he describes as a "creeping tar" and "a blue-black bird, its talons piercing my lung" that is honest and devastating. Both the meandering story and the way Joe expresses his thoughts feel accurately claustrophobic. Where Maksik really excels is in his unrestrained depiction of a perpetually broken man who can't help loving volatile, vulnerable Tess, all the while desperately figuring out how to forgive the woman who raised him.
