Honestly loved this so much. It was bizarre, funny, and ultimately heartwarming. There were occasionally sections of the book that seemed a little pointless, but in the end they added to that dreamy, fantastical feeling that is found in a fairytale. The book also isn't that long, so I can forgive it for meandering a bit.

Thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for this ARC!

Strange, surreal little novel that takes the absurdity of apartment hunting, pushes it into a full dystopia (in which everyone in the big city is being forced out due to mandated renovations to appeal to AirBNBs), and then decides to let it wander into a kafkaesque fairy tale, in which our main finds a home, eventually is able to retrieve her stuff in storage, retrieve her sister who has been institutionalized (that eventually morphs into a cult) and also lives in a giant shoe shaped building, for funsies. Interesting debut, and worth a read when it comes out this fall.

ehhh idk. I ended up not really liking this one a whole lot. maybe the timing wasn't good and it just wasn't what I wanted it to be. a little too many fantastical elements for me to keep up with. 2.5 rounded up~

Dwelling is such a unique, thoughtful, creative novel, and I loved every second of it! I truly enjoyed that it wasn't just another story about housing or home, but explored and probed deeper topics with a charming style that left me both informed and ready to read it again. The fairytale, almost Alice in Wonderland feel spun thins around, and combined with the sharp social commentary made for a really engaging read!

I was really hoping for a brutal satirical takedown of the housin g crisis, and this wasn't that. So that's just my issue.

Evie’s landlord evicts her from her home in The City, and she relocates to Gulluck, TX because few options to live close to family exist. She and her sister, Elena, lose their mom to ovarian cancer and their dad to heartbreak and nutrient deficiency. The trauma from their deaths causes Elena’s hallucinations and violent behavior; as a threat to herself and others, they move her into a New Age facility in Colorado for patients requiring treatment for their mental health. As such, when Evie can’t make rent, she hopes her distant Aunt Terry and their family in Texas will provide a temporary living situation. Terry works as a real estate agent and, with limited options, convinces Evie to rent a shoe-shaped house in Gulluck, a town where magical realism comes to life (e.g., the shape-shifting fish under wraps). With a shortage of work projects, Evie quits her remote marketing job and embraces her endowed fate brought by her house; as a transplant, she forms her life to fit her home’s story and learns to design and make shoes. Her shoemaking course instructor notices Evie’s natural penchant for constructing footwear and inducts her into a secret “league of immortal shoemakers.” With the help of her boyfriend, Bertie the Keymaker, who crafts a skeleton key, Evie plans to break Elena out of the inpatient facility because of their sudden suspicious shift to emulate a cultish commune. Together, the women trek to New York to retrieve their family’s locked-up belongings and return to Gulluck, their newfound haven.

Pulling from different folk stories involving living in a shoe for a house and shaping keys based on the story of the door, Kivel’s debut begins squarely in the fiction genre and layers in magical realism in part 2 and a quest in part 3. In other words, Kivel’s critique of the housing market in America jumps off of the page in the initial part of Dwelling; later, Kivel shifts to using aphorisms and poetic lore in her assessment of one’s place of residence and resiliently rebuilding a home despite its destruction. Some of the metaphors or themes are lost to me, such as the Gulluck’s secret fish, the undying shoemakers, and Elena’s mental health. Still, I appreciate the author’s folding in of different genres. If one can suspend their belief of reality and embrace the fantastical that leaves questions unanswered, Dwelling can help expand the imagination.

My thanks to Farrar, Straus and Giroux and NetGalley for an ARC. I shared this review on GoodReads on July 13, 2025 (https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/7670105430).

What an utterly charming book! I found it reminiscent of the movie Big Fish--it had that wondrous and magical element that made it so achingly delightful to read. From being booted from her apartment in New York (along with many thousands of other people) to living in a house shaped like a shoe. A strange city in Texas with albino cicadas, quirky townspeople, and a gigantic fish...it's a bit like stepping into a fun house mirror. This is surreal and fantastical and 100% worth your time.

I did find that Part I of the book felt slightly disjointed from the rest of the story, but maybe that was the intended progression.

The beginning of this book was superb. It was just surreal enough to offer a feeling of removal while providing an interesting social commentary. While there were still elements that were quite funny, the more fantastical parts of the plot halfway through threw me off. I know the book is leaning into fairytale and folklore, but I struggled with different symbolic elements, like the sleeping fish. I also think Elena’s story could have held more weight as a form of satire. I honestly rushed through the second half wishing it was flush with the first – had it been, this would have been a 5 star for me.

A huge thank you to FSG and NetGalley for providing me an ARC in exchange for my honest review.

Extremely well written. I am not usually one for fairytale retellings, but this really worked for me. Beautiful prose and well written characters

<i>Go quietly over mountains, down valleys, through the doors of your enemies. Through bogs and woods and forests, and into the unknown.</i>

I have to be honest, it reached a point where I didn't even know what was going on, but with those last 5 chapters.... i got it. I really liked this book, it's so calm even though nothing that goes on can calm you down.

I don't know, i give it a 3.5/5, but it is genuinely a really good book to read slowly and digest every chapter with time.

A delightful and witty story of a young woman who is priced out of her NYC apartment and ends up living in a shoe-shaped house in a quirky town in Texas.

Hmm. Uneven yet charming. Bold yet soft. Relaxed yet ultimately rushed. There are a lot of contradictions at play in this debut, but also much to enjoy. I congratulate the author on the originality of her vision and the daring of melding fairytale and (some) realism. She also writes delightfully, with freshness and wit. But… the pacing is all over the place, there are loose ends, dead ends, tangents that aren’t worth the bother. A firmer editorial hand would have been helpful.
Nevertheless, I think there’s much to recommend here and I wish the author and the book attention and success. Perhaps a more disciplined second novel will reach even higher.

Brimming with heart, loss, and hope, this book makes you reimagine what home means and where home truly is. Filled with incredible characters and a sense of wonder, you won’t be able to stop thinking about this book after you’ve read it. It’ll seep into your mind and make you think about how places can change you. A must read!

Thank you to NetGalley and the publishers Farrar, Straus and Giroux for this E-Arc. All opinions are my own.

I find it hard to describe this book but the best I can come up with is: a surreal coming of age story, set in a bleak economic future.

I enjoyed this book, the plot was interesting and I was engaged with the writing. I thought I kind of understood what was going on until a certain society threw me off the loop. I wasn't mad at it because at that point I had suspended my belief and thought yep, why not? This was a quick and strange read, but overall entertaining.

I was drawn to the cover and the promise of folkloric elements, but I just could not get into this far enough. Probably not for me.

I really struggled with this one. The premise had promise—Evie, a graphic designer evicted from her NYC apartment during a housing crisis, is forced to seek refuge with a distant cousin in a strange Texas town. The first half is bleak and grounded, setting up what felt like a near-future dystopia. But then, halfway through, it completely derails.

Evie ends up living in a literal shoe, gets mistaken for a cobbler, and discovers a magical gift for shoemaking. From there, the book devolves into a whimsical Mother Goose retelling complete with a secret society of immortal shoemakers. I found the tonal shift not just disorienting, but frustrating. The whimsy undercut the seriousness of the story’s early themes, and by the time the magical elements fully took over, I was checked out.

Worse, the pacing dragged—the narrative droned on in places where it should’ve come alive. I kept waiting for the story to either lean into its original grit or fully embrace the magic in a meaningful way, but it never quite did either. I think fairy tale lovers might have more patience for it, but for me, it was a slog.

This was so good - in the beginning! I could not enjoy when the fairy tale retelling part came into play. I would have loved this as a literary fiction novel.

Thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for the opportunity to read this book in exchange for my honest opinion.

Pub Date: August 5, 2025

Thank you to Farrar, Straus and Giroux and NetGalley for providing an ARC in exchange for an honest review.

Unfortunately, this book didn’t quite work for me. I was fully engaged during the first third, where we meet our main character, explore the roots of the housing crisis, and follow her journey to Texas. I found her — along with her sister and cousin — genuinely compelling.

However, the story lost me as it shifted to the town of Gulluck, TX. I hadn’t realized this was essentially a fairy tale retelling, and since I don't typically enjoy fairy tales, I struggled to connect with the more fantastical elements.

What initially drew me in was the synopsis, especially the line: “The world is ending. It has been ending for some time. When did the ending begin?” I expected a dystopian narrative. While the book does comment on dystopian themes like the housing crisis and late-stage capitalism, it wasn’t the apocalyptic story I had anticipated.

I also found the writing style less compelling than I had hoped. When I pick up a book from FSG, I expect to be swept away by the prose, but this didn’t quite deliver on that front for me.

Ultimately, I wish the novel had stayed closer to the tone and direction of its first third. It’s certainly not a bad book, but it didn’t meet my expectations.

Dwelling is a story of a woman trying to find her place in this world, both literally and figuratively. It's a surreal fairytale retelling in a world where our economic future is not looking good.

Our protagonist, Evie, is evicted from her home and city in the midst of a housing crisis in New York. Without parents or friends and a sister living in a mental institution, Evie has nobody to turn to. Except, she remembers a distant cousin living in Gulluck, Texas. And so, Evie sets out in search of a home. There she meets ancient creatures, a secret society, and more weird and magical people.

The book starts really great. The New York in Evie's world faces mass evictions caused by the city's deal with the world's leading rental vacation company. Incentives were given to landlords to renovate and eviction restrictions and regulations are lifted. In the end, the renters were not able to cope with these changes and a lot of people like Evie became homeless. Only property owners were able to stay in the city.

In Part 1, we read about New York looking like a deserted city after an apocalypse because of the mass migration, looting, and abandoned personal things on the streets. This vision of New York is not impossible. It maybe even happening now and in other parts of the world.

Part 2 is the core of the story. We see Evie transform from a passive worker and disengaged member of the society to a person who takes control and builds her life.

Another thing that I loved in Part 2 is where Terry, the distant cousin says, that her son thinks that his parent's generation maybe the last of their generation to own property. And so, he is trying to be good to his parents so that they will allow him to live in their home forever. Reading this made me sad because I know this is already happening. Andrew, the son, is anxious about being able to create a sense of place in his future. He is scared of the bleak economic future that's slowly dawning on him, on us too, here, in real life.

Part 3 was weird. It felt like two different plots pasted into one book. Dwelling started with an almost dystopian plot but ended up being a fairy tale retelling. I am not quite sure yet if this worked well. Despite that, this book was a joy to read.

There might be a good story here but the writing was so flat and uninspired that i began to think about the sentences themselves, often so empty if meaning, and to wonder why these sentences were there for me to read, filling my head with the blandest sort of processed-food images, instead of being edited to mean something precise and thoughtful, or excised as nonessential beats and unnecessary fillers of pages. I don’t mind plain writing but I do mind when characters are treated like puppets to be moved about on strings. The lack of musicality and precision was striking.