In 1986 I read David Leavitt's novel The Lost Language of Cranes and it blew me away. Although I have his novel The Indian Clerk on by TBR shelf, I haven't read more by him and it was time to correct that. Especially, it was time for this novel.

Reading in the age of Coronavirus is not easy. I pick up my Kindle, read for a bit, then find myself on Twitter or checking my email or placing an order for delivered groceries. It isn't the books--they are great books. I just have trouble concentrating.

But, I had no problem with Shelter in Place--it's a comedy of manners under the Trump presidency that kept me entertained. These characters are rich and liberal and, well, flaky.

Eva won't even say the president's name, (think Voldemort) and yet she wouldn't stand in the long lines to vote. After Eva and her friend Min visit Venice, she decides to buy an apartment there, a place to escape to when America is no longer safe. Her obliging husband Bruce plays his role in their marriage: he earns--she spends. A successful wealth manager, he is rich enough to indulge his wife's whims.

And Eva does spend.

Eva is determined the Venice home would be redecorated by her favorite decorator Jake. But hearing he would have to go to Venice, he has been stalling. Likeable, secretive, Jake is the straight man in the novel--well, a gay straight man, a foil to the people who hire him.

When Eva's dogs start peeing on the sofa, she has the maid wrap it in aluminum foil! "Some things matter more than decor," Eva proclaims, and yet she has not considered what will happen to the dogs when she--or she and Bruce--goes to Venice.

Bruce's secretary is battling cancer, her husband abandoning her. He becomes overly involved with her life, his version of charity.

Bruce also has been consorting with the enemy---the Trump supporting neighbor Alec whose kids won't talk to him since the election. Alec can't even say Hillary's name. The election results came as a miracle to him. "One man's miracle is another's nightmare," Bruce says. Walking their dogs at night, they confide to each other.

Shelter in Place targets our idiosyncrasies when our world suddenly changes, on the national and personal level. Sometimes we grow, other times we dig in and hold on tighter.

I received a free ebook from the publisher through NetGalley in exchange for a fair and unbiased review.

Thank you to Bloomsbury USA and NetGalley for providing me with an advanced copy of this book.
This book was, unfortunately, not for me. I'm sick of politics so I don't really want to be reading about it in my leisure time. I wasn't rooting for any of the characters. I'm sorry to give it a low rating but the behaviors of the characters just rubbed me the wrong way.

This timely piece of fiction starts with a group of wealthy, white liberals who’ve gathered for dinner and share disdain over the recent presidential election. Like many, they wonder just how in fact the country has gotten to this point in our history. The book does a fantastic job of poking jabs at the complex and often hypocritical relationship between wealth and liberal politics. The reader often finds themselves annoyed with the characters privilege and hypocrisy. However in this authors hands, you still empathize with their struggle. Fantastic read.

Shelter in Place is set in 2016, immediately after the presidential election. Fairly early into the book, one of the characters comes out with: "Ninety percent of what gets published is worthless...when writers start to feel oppressed again they'll start to write books worth reading instead of all that idiotic upper-middle-class self-absorbed liberal navel-gazing crap we got when Obama was president." The irony is that this book is all about idiotic upper-middle-class self-absorbed liberal navel-gazing people. One character after the other, they excel at it. But even saying that, I found this bunch of self-absorbed idiots to be a hoot. I really only liked one person in this cast of characters, but their privileged yet sad existence of constant gossiping, lies and one-upping was hilarious to observe from a distance.

It would be interesting to know how quickly the author turned out this book. Even though set in 2016, and escapism due to election results plays a big part of the story, the title here takes on a new meaning with what the world has experienced in 2020.

Thanks to #NetGalley and #BloomsburyPublishing for a free copy in exchange for an honest review.

I enjoyed the perspective of someone who didn't like the way that Clinton lost the presidential election to Trump. The lengths that they went to avoid dealing with their own personal issues while blaming everything on "not my president" was interesting. It gave an interesting viewpoint into a lifestyle that I can't relate to.

It's been a long time since I've read a David Leavitt novel, but now I want to read the ones I missed. SHELTER IN PLACE was a pitch-perfect satire of a privileged group of friends after the Trump election. It would be easy for me to accuse these characters of being ridiculous--except I know people who actually behave like this, so the book struck me as being refreshingly honest about the hypocrisy and self-entitled nonsense that exists in post-Trump America.

My favorite character was Eva, whose rants about the political climate of the country set the tone for the rest of the book. To counter her arguments, the book has a couple of Republican characters who think Eva's outrage is unfounded and over-the-top. And indeed, Eva is an over-the-top character. She's decided to buy and redecorate a new home in Venice so she can escape the fall of democracy in the U.S. What makes Eva so interesting is that she's completely oblivious to her own sense of entitlement. She's the type of person I would hate in real life, but as a character, she's fascinating.

I also enjoyed the text message exchanges with Jake, the gay interior decorator, and his virtual boyfriend Simon. Jake brings some levity to the novel; his relationship issues were one of the more serious parts of the novel.

With humorous dialogue throughout the book, SHELTER IN PLACE shines a mirror on the cultural elite. Not everyone will like this tongue-in-cheek book, but I hope it finds its niche. It's very clever.

Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for providing me with an ARC in exchange for an honest review.

I’m not entirely sure what this book was going for. Based on the description, I thought it’d be one thing, but it was something else. It was somewhat disjointed - many half stories without completion. The chapters jump around and seem unfinished.

A world of privilege, a sense of being owed something (many things) because of one’s status. A need for constant validation and getting it purely based on the company kept. The only characters that were remotely likable are Bruce and Jake - but neither of them are stand up men.

#ShelterinPlace #NetGalley

Shelter in Place is set in a world completely unfamiliar to me, the New York City dwellers with second homes in Connecticut. David Leavitt creates a funny cast of characters in this book that gives shelter a new meaning. When Eva feels the US may become unsafe after Trump’s inauguration she seeks solace in the project of buying an apartment in Venice. Then she must have it redone by the decorator who has done all of her homes. This book was funny and the interiors were vivid!

"Shelter in Place is a novel about house and home, furniture and rooms, safety and freedom and the invidious ways in which political upheaval can undermine even the most seemingly impregnable foundations."

This is oddly interesting for a book without much of a plot and nobody to root for. And yet it is hard to look away. It is full of unlikable, self-centered people having excessively long conversations, mostly about themselves. The opening line, and the descriptions, make it sound like it will be a different story than it is. The book opens on a strong, interesting note, and goes a bit downhill from there into the private dysfunctions of upper class liberals. There are some interesting side plots, but I tend to struggle with a book where I can't find much redeemable with the protagonists.

This book is very dialogue centered, with long stretches of conversations between characters. I find too much dialogue a bit tedious, and sometimes lose track of which character is actually speaking. The thing with this book is that the dialogue is probably one of the best parts, but I just find the characters so difficult to like that I am struggling to review the book fairly.

I will say that this is a well-written book, with some interesting premises. I just felt that thy weren't fully explored and it had the potential to be better than it was. That said, if you view it as a satire of the way upper class liberals behaved in late 2016/early 2017, it is a very funny skewering of that particular response, and becomes a very different book. Through that viewpoint, the book becomes exponentially better, but I couldn't quite tell if it was meant to be serious or not.

Overall I would say a solid 3 stars.

Wanted to like this book. Just couldn't take it.

Thanks to author,publisher and Netgalley for the chance to read this book. While I got the book for free,it had no bearing on the rating I gave it.

I could not get into this book - too much politics. I have to listen to the politics everyday over and over again, I do not want to take my reading time for "fun" and have to read about it too. I cannot give this book a positive recommendation. I must have misunderstood what this book was about.

I go back and forth on Shelter in Place. On the one hand, I enjoyed the deep dive into decorating and I loved the detailed descriptions. On the other hand, the characters were not as dimensional as I would've liked and the ones that I was the most interested in got perhaps the least amount of development. All in all, this was overall a disappointing novel.

I could not lock into this book. It seems dated now. I thought the characters were stereotypes.

It’s like reading through a political commentary. I do understand during these quarantine days I need very special books to engage me, but this wasn’t one.

Thank you Netgalley for this ARC.

I want to thank NetGalley, Bloomsbury USA, and author David Leavitt for providing me with an ARC of this novel!

I LOVED the idea for this title. What a relevant and important story line, in my opinion. I believe it was executed well, too. The characters we come to meet are all super rich New Yorkers. We see many of the usual representations; the self-absorbed woman, her clingy friend, the gay interior designer, the angry white dude… They all come together to make an intriguing and absorbing cast of characters. This novel takes place right after Trump is elected in 2016, and main character Eva finds herself in a panic. She attempts to get an apartment in Venice to escape the impending doom, but the purchase turns out to be so much more difficult. This was so good, and something I feel a lot of us can relate to with our current state of affairs.

Thank you to those named above for the chance to read and review this novel!

This began feeling an awful lot like watching strangers argue politics on Twitter. It just didn't work for me, and I put it aside without finishing it.

A good first sentence is important. Just ask Tolstoy. Or Dickens. Or so many famous authors, really. So the author went with that here, in a novel that seems like it surely must have been retitled to accommodate present day nightmarish world. An attention getting first sentence uttered at a fancy party. A moral challenge of sorts to the guests. But the novel itself isn’t at all as daring or radical or dangerous as all that. In fact it’s relatively mild and very plush, as in too many cushions on the couch plush. It’s a novel about (and possibly for) a very specific type of people, the New York City wealthy liberal social elite (is there a name for this sort of fiction, there ought to be, there’s enough books like that to at the very least populate a subgenre, something like $liblitNYC…but no, that sounds like an Elon Musk baby name), set in the immediate aftermath of the 2016 election which they collectively bemoan. The novel revolves around Eva, a woman strikingly undeserving of being a center of attention, since her main attribute seems to be spending her spouse’s, the infinitely preternaturally patient amiable Bruce’s, money. Which is to say Eva doesn’t work and hasn’t in all of the years she’s been married, she seems to have no pursuits outside of throwing parties, socializing and decorating. She’s like a Kardashian, but much less sexualized, in fact practically prudish. Nevertheless, despite her qualities or, more likely, because of them, she attracts quite a following with similar, but less vapid, individuals of similar but less moneyed class. And then chat. They love to chat, over food, which is catered, by a rotating roster of young gay men Eva hires. There’s so much chattering, the book quite often reads like a play, only it’s much more dynamic than a regular play and has more descriptions. Bruce adores Eva for no apparent reason. Though eventually her Evaness becomes too much as she becomes obsessed with buying a complicatedly deeded apartment in Venice to get away from, as she perceives it, impending fascist state and more specifically her republican neighbor. Bruce is nice to a fault, he’s even friendly with the republican neighbor. In fact, Bruce begins to develop something like social conscience. In fact, Bruce might even try to look for love outside of his plushly vapid marriage. Bruce might try to be happy. Which is all very lovely, had the novel not been so much about Eva, the tedious, tedious Eva. So let’s look at some pros and cons here…this is my first time reading the author and as far as introductions go, it’s pretty good, the writing is quite enjoyable and clever and I wouldn’t be oppose to checking out some of his short fiction, which is apparently his forte. Was this meant to be a satire? If so it isn’t terribly funny. It has its moments, but mostly it doesn’t seem especially exaggerated as satires tend to be, because the characters are very much lifelike in their representation of a certain social class, you know, the class that people who were made happy by the results of the 2016 election hate so much. But it isn’t a straight dramatic narrative either. Maybe it’s meant to be a comedy of manners. There are moments where it’ either pedantic or literary snippy in just the right way. The characters are somewhat obnoxious and mostly tedious, though none so much as Eva, their queen elect, Bruce is really the only genuinely likeable person. Why or how that marriage has survived or lasted is a mystery. The main explanation seems to be that Bruce is just that agreeable and easygoing. Frankly, it’s difficult to imagine anyone to be that agreeable and easygoing. The dialogue is fun and snappy. The novel read easily and it did entertain, albeit it a somewhat frustrating manner. So overall, pretty good, definitely not great, but at least a very quick read. Thanks Netgalley.