Prodigal Summer

From Amazon: Prodigal Summer weaves together three stories of human love within a larger tapestry of lives inhabiting the forested mountains and struggling small farms of southern Appalachia. At the heart of these intertwined narratives is a den of coyotes that have recently migrated into the region. Deanna Wolfe, a reclusive wildlife biologist, watches the forest from her outpost in an isolated mountain cabin where she is caught off-guard by Eddie Bondo, a young hunter who comes to invade her most private spaces and confound her self-assured, solitary life. On a farm several miles down the mountain, another web of lives unfolds as Lusa Maluf Landowski, a bookish city girl turned farmer's wife, finds herself unexpectedly marooned in a strange place where she must declare or lose her attachment to the land. And a few more miles down the road, a pair of elderly, feuding neighbors tend their respective farms and wrangle about God, pesticides, and the complexities of a world neither of them expected.

Over the course of one humid summer, as the urge to procreate overtakes a green and profligate countryside, these characters find connections to one another and to the flora and fauna with which they necessarily share a place. Their discoveries are embedded inside countless intimate lessons of biology, the realities of small farming, and the final, urgent truth that humans are only one part of life on earth.

With the richness that characterizes Barbara Kingsolver's finest work, Prodigal Summer embraces pure thematic originality and demonstrates a balance of narrative and ideas that only an accomplished novelist could render so beautifully.

I'm not going to lie to you, I struggled getting into this book. A friend of mine accurately described the book as "mothy". The entire book is filled with a lot of scientific talk of nature, especially moths. There's also a scene that I won't spoil for you but one of the characters has a dream about a moth that was quite...unusual. Not that I don't also have strange dreams but this one took the cake in my opinion. 


The book focuses on three main characters who never quite intersect. Deanna is a moody middle aged woman living up 'air in the mountain as a forest ranger. I found it hard to understand her constant mood swings. Lusa is a young widow learning to cope not only with the loss of her husband but also trying to find acceptance among her four sister in laws. I found Lusa to be a likable character and would have happily read a book just about her. Lastly, the was Garnett, a retired high school teacher in his 80's. Garnett is as a crotchety old man as they come. Many of the chapters devoted to him had me laughing out loud. 


The personal story lines of Prodigal Summer were enjoyable, they drew me in and left me wondering what happened to each character after the final page was turned. The long winded paragraphs about bugs, birds, wildlife and plants were dry and tedious reading. I found myself skipping ahead to get back to the story. I also found some of it to be preachy. I don't know how many times I needed to hear each character talk about the importance of leaving predators alone and not using pesticides. I wanted to just scream "I heard you the first time lady!"


All in all, I enjoyed the book but don't think I would read anything else by this author unless it was about these characters (I really do want to know what happened to them). I felt that it slowed me down on my reading (I have something like 12 ebooks checked out from Overdrive at the moment) and made me work too hard at paying attention to what was going on rather than just enjoying the story.