Rating: 
Summary: Kingsolver's best yet
Review: Kingsolver's gift for clarity has been evident since her earliest novels - reading her prose is often like taking a deep breath of fresh air. Her previous book, "The Poisonwood Bible," exhibited the author's gift for creating complex, compelling characters, particularly in the cases of Leah and Adah. However, in that book readers could sense her tension in some spots - she was trying just a little too hard to make the right statement and pound it into her reader's heads, and her wonderfully distilled writing became muddled in places. In "Prodigal Summer," Kingsolver had perfectly melded her clear prose and her outstanding characters; she also has relaxed and allowed her characters to be inexact and uncertain (not always the case in "Poisonwood Bible"). The result is a story that reads very true-to-life, and characters that feel so real you may think of them later and forget they were people in a book, not people you know. For this book, Kingsolver also seems to borrow Alice Hoffman's trademark: the environment is as crucial a character as any of the people are. The trees, the land, the weather - all step out of the background and play an active roll in the story. This is somewhat new for Kingsolver, and she integrates it effectively and it suits her writing style very well. The book is essentially three mostly separate stories written concurrently. The chapters switch focus from one set of characters to the next. Even though the characters from each story never interact directly, by the end you can feel the ways in which they're all connected. I knew this was a great book when at the end of every chapter I'd say "THIS is the storyline I like the best," only the change my mind at the end of the next chapter. A wonderful read.
Rating:
Summary: A moral imperative
Review: Kingsolver's book is all about understanding relationships-between man and the enviroment, women and men, old and young, parents and children. Prodigal Summer has everything a good book needs to keep you turning the pages. As you do, you either learn something new or see something you should care about more.Is laughter the sure sign of the presence of God? She makes you laugh too. It's all about living on this planet in a more caring way.
Rating:
Summary: Life in a balance
Review: It had been a few years since I picked up a Kingsolver novel, and I'm pleased to see that she's still such a strong observer of human nature, such a good storyteller. Prodigal Summer is about the balance that we must ultimately strike between the human need to cultivate the earth to survive and wildlife's need to exist in an ecosystem unmolested by tractors and bug sprays. But the novel is really about how Kingsolver's characters slowly come to realize how they are a part of the complex network of beings that make up a community--such as the one Kingsolver so artfully paints here in this hollow. I really love how honest Kingsolver is about her characters--that nothing is ever cheap or easy...that we must answer some tough questions and face consequences when we move to protect what we think is ours alone--our land, our husband, our trees. The pairings of characters, who each begin so far away from each other in understanding, and who grow closer together by the book's end, is just delightful. You begin by identifying with one of pair, and by the end, you identify with both. You really do grow in your own understanding as the characters grow. This is such good writing--stirring, sexy, sad, fulfilling. A really great novel.
Rating: 
Summary: Barbara, Barbara, Barbara,,,
Review: I am truly a Barbara Kingsolver fan. My favorite book is "The Bean Trees." However, when I read "The Poisonwood Bible" I was soooo disappointed. Alas, "Prodigal Summer" came out, and I bought it (in hardback) right away, hoping Barbara was back on track. Well, I finally finished the book this weekend (Thanksgiving 2001). I just could not get into this book. I found the characters boring and self righteous. In my opinion, Deanna is a weak woman with serious problems in that she prefers isolation to true human contact. I can appreciate Barbara Kingsolver's need to publize her beliefs, but she pays a large price in doing so. Instead of a well written, enjoyable book, with characters you like she ends up with annoying characters. Who wants to learn from them?
Rating:
Summary: A lyrical tribute to the rhythms of nature
Review: This book delivers a sumptuous feast on human nature and animal nature. I loved every bit of this beautifully crafted novel that follows the lives of several inhabitants of a rural Appalachian community over the course of a summer. They each have a passionate relationship with the natural world as well as being entagled in difficult human relationships. The only negative comment I have is that Kingsolver is heavy-handed in preaching her ecological messages. In spite of that it still gets 5 stars for the delight it brought me on nearly every page. This is a book filled with hope and humor that resonates with the beauty of the natural world.
Rating:
Summary: A wonderful earth-friendly novel!
Review: Let me say right up front that I thought this was a wonderful book. I've been reading a series of what might be called eco-novels and thought that Kingsolver did a marvelous job of bringing environmental issues to life through her characters and descriptions of the natural world. I think a lot of the reviewers who didn't like this book really weren't criticizing the book, they were objecting to Kingsolver's obvious sympathy for the concerns of environmentalism. I was struck however by one review that suggested that tho the reader was sympathetic to Kingsolver's views, the book nonetheless tended to be preachy. I disagree. Altho the book cited for comparison by that reviewer, Rand Johnson's eco-fable "Arcadia Falls", is also a wonderful book that explores environmental issues with sympathy and sensitivity (I just read it too), it isn't better than "Prodigal Summer", just different. I think there are few enough books that deal with these critical issues that there's no need to pit one against the other - just read and enjoy!
Rating:
Summary: Who else can write a love story making science sound sexy?
Review: Barbara Kingsolver is a passionate writer. Fortunately for us, that passion extends out from under the covers to the natural world and beyond. She is able to combine her gift of compelling storytelling with her love of science in Prodigal Summer. Here, in three separate storylines set in and around the fertile life of a nature preserve, we see an older couple learning to respect their differences; newlyweds standing up to the ignorance around them; and the passion of Deanna, the researcher, and Eddie, the hunter, victims of their own sexual attraction, which neither can justify. This is a wonderfully inventive love story, so different than the usual because Kingsolver herself is not just a novelist, but a scientist as well. The reader always wins when we are treated to Kingsolver exploring human nature. I highly recommend this book.
Rating: 
Summary: Prodigal Summer
Review: This is a shallow, didactic book written by someone who feels she must preach to the peasants out there who are foolish enought to read what she writes. There isn't one person in the book to feel simpatico with. They all either use others, or let themselves be used by others. Ms. Kingsolver gave us an interesting read with the Poisonwood Bible, but there hasn't been another of her books that I would recommend. I've finally decided that I don't need to read another of her books.
Rating:
Summary: Five stars are not enough
Review: Alone on her mountain, Deanna is hugging a secret. A coyote pack has recently moved to the Appalachian Mountains overlooking Zebulon Valley, Virginia, where this story is set. Despite Deanna's determination to protect them, the coyotes' fate is precarious. Will they survive the malevolence of farmers and bounty hunters to the last page of Prodigal Summer? This suspense is but one of the many factors that makes Barbara Kingsolver's latest novel a haunting page turner. Deanna has more in common with Lusa, a young widow living in the valley, than either woman knows. Both are scientists and environmentalists, striving to reconcile the economic interests of their Virginia tobacco farming town with the larger needs of the planet. We wait for their lives to intersect, but Kingsolver spins their stories slowly, bringing them closer and closer together until their meeting is inevitable. Prodigal Summer isn't the first novel in which Kingsolver reveals her environmental ethos, but it is perhaps the first one that openly demonstrates how formidably well versed she is in natural history. Her detailed knowledge of the Appalachian ecosystem is especially impressive. But where science writing is frequently dry, Kingsolver makes the sex life of moths and coyotes riveting reading. In her hands, the silent war between organic farmers and those that believe in pesticides has the firm grip of a 1950s detective thriller. Though Kingsolver's politics are transparent in Prodigal Summer, she never reduces her characters to stereotypes. In the elderly Garnett, for instance, the novelist delivers a heartwarming, sometimes humorous portrait of an aging gentleman farmer, baffled at the changing mores which assail him from all sides, even in a rural Virginia farming town. Without ridiculing him, Kingsolver shows that Garnett's troubles-the extinction of the American chestnut and a hardy strain of crop-devouring insects-are the result of pesticide use and clear cutting, practices which Garnett still naively supports. Yet Kingsolver's portrait of him is overwhelmingly forgiving and sympathetic. His diminishing eyesight, his Friday afternoon seafood buffet ritual, his inner turmoil, in which chivalry contends with petty revenge, are portrayed with uncanny realism. Readers will be deeply moved by his longing to restore the chestnut to the forests of America. They will perceive early on that he is in love with his neighbor, the rebel Nannie, a woman close to his own age. And they will ache for him to make this discovery himself. It will be tempting for reviewers to call Prodigal Summer a manifesto against agricultural pesticides and bounties on predator animals. But Prodigal Summer should not be sold short. It is beautifully conceived fiction, with symmetry, suspense and complex characters as subtly crafted as any being written today.
Rating:
Summary: A Challenge
Review: I offer a challenge to those people who refuse to stop reading a book before it is finished. Start this novel. If you can get through it, you are a better person than I. I have struggled through the long prose of Melville and the 1000 page novels of Dickens, but this book moves about as fast as a turtle with no legs trying to swim in a pool of molasses. If you get this book as a present, (shame on you if you bought it) I wish you luck, you will need it.
| 
