Inhabited

Starred review from December 5, 2016
In this hopeful novel, Quimby (Monument Road) portrays two lives and a small city at a moment of change. Meg Mogrin is a real estate agent, and therefore naturally aligned with development interests, but she’s also a member of the Grand Junction, Colo., Homeless Coalition. In her past she has been a teacher, a wife, a sister, and something a bit more than a witness to the death of a serial killer. Isaac Samson is a homeless man with a library science degree who functions well most days but who is also troubled by voices and conspiracy theories. Lew Hungerman is considering moving the headquarters of Betterment Health to town at the same time that homeless crusader Wesley Chambers wants the city to approve a permanent tent city for the homeless. The lives of Quimby’s finely drawn characters interweave to produce a panorama as wide and full of light as the near-desert setting. Even his minor figures add significantly to the whole, and his skillful and delightful turns of phrase make reading this evocative novel a pleasure.

Meg Mogrin tries to do the right thing, something she's failed at once before, as she's dragged into clashes between homeless people and business interests in Grand Junction, Colorado.Meg once taught. Then her sister was murdered by Neulan, a serial killer who escaped arrest. Then Neulan died in a fall. Meg and her husband, Brian, were involved. Meg's moral center shifted, and her marriage collapsed. Burdened by guilt, she left teaching for real estate. Still plagued by guilt, she does penance by devoting energy to a local organization, the Homeless Coalition. Now her friend Eve Winslow, the city's mayor, and other major players are subtly hinting that Meg should help displace the homeless from the scrubland where they've been living to secure a location for a multimillion dollar project, the Betterment Longevity Institute. In narrative threads ebbing and flowing, a lot happens: Betterment's smarmy Lew Hungerman wants to sleep with Meg and use her to roust the homeless; a brilliant homeless man, Isaac Samson, discovers a clue to Neulan's death; Pandora Cox, an edgy teen who earned a scholarship sponsored by Meg, instead heads for the North Dakota oil fields with her controlling boyfriend. Quimby's (Monument Road, 2013, etc.) descriptions of Colorado's high country show a painterly flare, and he offers keen insights into human dynamics--as when Meg meditates on a man's "power of denial and condescension." Quimby also writes powerfully of marriage and its meaning, as Meg and Brian, doing his own penance at an isolated reservation, dance quietly toward reconciliation. The opening two-thirds of the story reads as a complex setting of scene and circumstances, but then Quimby charges toward an emotionally satisfying conclusion.More angst than action, more internal conflict than outright adventure, yet an intriguing examination of people and a place in transition. COPYRIGHT(1) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

November 15, 2016

In this follow-up to his debut novel, Monument Road, Quimby returns to his native western Colorado and the city of Grand Junction, a town built at the confluence of the Colorado and Gunnison Rivers. It's on the riverbanks that Quimby's story begins. The banks are covered in invasive tamarisk, ideal thickets for concealing homeless encampments. Realtor Meg Mogrin joins the Homeless Coalition as just another civic duty, but when she accompanies the police homeless outreach team to an encampment, she comes face-to-face with a dark reality. Afterward, when another encampment is burned out by what the local newspaper calls a brush fire, with no mention of the displaced, Meg becomes more concerned, starting to see them as individuals with past lives, families, and basic needs. A developer promises economic revival, but Meg soon realizes that some community figures favor the developer's money over potential solutions to the homeless problem. Meanwhile, she wrestles with a dark secret tied to her sister's murder 20 years earlier. VERDICT Using familiar characters from Monument Road, Quimby casts a novelist's keen eye on a portion of society who live without secure and safe shelter. His compassion and insight make the story irresistible.--Donna Bettencourt, Mesa Cty. P.L., Grand Junction, CO

Copyright 2016 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

October 15, 2016
Quimby continues the Colorado tale he began in Monument Road (2013) by bringing secondary characters to center stage. Meg Mogrin is a successful realtorin her hometown of Grand Junction, a once-prosperous city stuck in a prolonged economic downturn; Isaac Samson is a native of Grand Junction who now lives on its fringes. Their worlds collide when a proposed real-estate development plan disrupts the fragile equilibrium between the city's leaders and its growing and increasingly organized homeless population. Quimby's experiences as a Colorado native and an advocate for the homeless provide the novel's backbone, but its real strength is in its cast of vivid, relatable individuals. There are neither heroes nor villains in Quimby's Grand Junction; instead, people on both sides of the development divide discover surprising commonalities when it comes to their ideas of family and home. Recommend to readers attuned to Kent Haruf, Annie Proulx, Laura Pritchett, and Bonnie Nadzam.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2016, American Library Association.)