A Favorite of 2,
Read by 23,
Owned by 15,
Reviewed by
1,
Quotes
0
There is no one in contemporary literature quite like Barbara Kingsolver. Her dialogue sparkles with sassy wit and earthy poetry; her descriptions are rooted in daily life but are also on familiar terms with the eternal. With Prodigal Summer, she
...(more) returns from the Congo to a "wrinkle on the map that lies between farms and wildness." And there, in an isolated pocket of southern Appalachia, she recounts not one but three intricate stories. Exuberant, lush, riotous--the summer of the novel is "the season of extravagant procreation" in which bullfrogs carelessly lay their jellied masses of eggs in the grass, "apparently confident that their tadpoles would be able to swim through the lawn like little sperms," and in which a woman may learn to "tell time with her skin." It is also the summer in which a family of coyotes moves into the mountains above Zebulon Valley: The ghost of a creature long extinct was coming in on silent footprints, returning to the place it had once held in the complex anatomy of this forest like a beating heart returned to its body. This is what she believed she would see, if she watched, at this magical juncture: a restoration. The "she" is Deanna Wolfe, a wildlife biologist observing the coyotes from her isolated aerie--isolated, that is, until the arrival of a young hunter who makes her even more aware of the truth that humans are only an infinitesimal portion in the ecological balance. This truth forms the axis around which the other two narratives revolve: the story of a city girl, entomologist, and new widow and her efforts to find a place for herself; and the story of Garnett Walker and Nannie Rawley, who seem bent on thrashing out the countless intimate lessons of biology as only an irascible traditional farmer and a devotee of organic agriculture can. As Nannie lectures Garnett, "Everything alive is connected to every other by fine, invisible threads. Things you don't see can help you plenty, and things you try to control will often rear back and bite you, and that's the moral of the story." Structurally, that gossamer web is the story: images, phrases, and events link the narratives, and these echoes are rarely obvious, always serendipitous. Kingsolver is one of those authors for whom the terrifying elegance of nature is both aesthetic wonder and source of a fierce and abiding moral vision. She may have inherited Thoreau's mantle, but she piles up riches of her own making, blending her extravagant narrative gift with benevolent concise humor. She treads the line between the sentimental and the glorious like nobody else in American literature. --Kelly Flynn(less)
About This Book
Help
Sign In
Prodigal Summer by Barbara Kingsolver – what a lovely book! This is a intricately woven tale of three lives in southern Appalachia over the course of one summer, lives in flux, even in crisis, and the land that nurtures them. The first is a biologist living in the woods, studying a family of coyotes until a hunter reminds her that humans are only a small part of the ecological balance, and that she is a woman whose solitary life needs some shaking up. Another is a widow from the big city trying to make a new life on her husband's family farm. The third is a crusty old, traditional farmer, battling against his neighbor who has a penchant for organic methods. It is delicately and beautifully written and I often swam in the language, losing track of time and feeling, however briefly, a freedom from that sense of urgency, which often overwhelms us in this fast-paced world, demanding our constant energy and attention.
From the Amazon.com review: “Kingsolver is one of those authors for whom the terrifying elegance of nature is both aesthetic wonder and source of a fierce and abiding moral vision. She may have inherited Thoreau's mantle, but she piles up riches of her own making, blending her extravagant narrative gift with benevolent concise humor. She treads the line between the sentimental and the glorious like nobody else in American literature.”
Other wonderful books by Barbara Kingsolver include:
Pigs in Heaven
Animal Dreams
High Tide in Tucson: Essays from Now or Never