A Brooklyn Renter’s Odyssey

Evie Cavallo is a young woman who lives in a shoe. To be specific, she rents a twenty-foot-tall cowboy-boot-shaped building, with an industrial-grade kitchen and deteriorating bistro chairs. She has to inform confused visitors, repeatedly, that this is her home. What is this doing to her psychologically, Evie wonders. Also: could it be true? “Dwelling,” Emily Hunt Kivel’s kooky, endearing fairy tale of a début novel, is interested in the wobbly line between what’s real and what’s not, and in the way that saying things can make them so.