Barbara Kingsolver's fifth novel is a hymn to wildness that celebrates the prodigal spirit of human nature, and of nature itself. It weaves together three stories of human love within a larger tapestry of lives amid the mountains and farms of southern Appalachia. Over the course of one humid summer, this novel's intriguing protagonists face disparate predicaments but find connections to one another and to the flora and fauna with which they necessarily share a place.
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 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
Customer Reviews:
Avg. Customer Rating: 4.0 / 5.0
I could smell spring. . . I felt like these were people I knew and finally understood better:
I loved, learned and lusted while reading this book. It was a sensual journey into nature and the lives of unusual characters. I learned about moths, predators and prey, and more. When I finished, I wanted to go out and plant a garden to get my hands dirty. While reading this book, I could smell spring, feel the sweat running down my back after hard work outside, appreciate nature in a new way. . . all while sitting in my living room.
Chick Lit for all of us:
With almost 500 reviews already in, I won't rehash them, just add a few points. Kingsolver has been accused of being too female-centric. That is at least a partially valid claim. Each of the novel's three separate story lines consists of a smart woman proving to a man (or men) that he is wrong. Most married men will find this scenario all too familiar. Kingsolver is no man-hater however. Her male characters are sympathetically drawn. They are simply misinformed or perhaps too caught up in their maleness.more info
Evocative, Sensual and Scientific!:
What an incredible book. Love, Loss, Nature, Humor, Lust and Ecology - all interwoven into beautiful sentences. I could not stop reading. I have to discover more of Kingsolver's works.
Maybe it is just me...:
This is my second Kingsolver book. I read one of her early works-so long ago I cannot remember which one. I liked one third of this book, which was Nannie's story; I loved Lusa's story and I could live without Deanna's story. Thus I gave it a middle rating. I have no complaint with Kingsolver's writing-excellent craftsman. But the subject matter and characters do not grab me emotionally. Since there is no plot then the characters need to carry the ball and this one is a fumble.
