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Women's Fiction

Prodigal Summer: A Novel

Prodigal Summer: A Novel

List Price: $14.00
Your Price: $10.50
Product Info Reviews

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Rating: 5 stars
Summary: Engaging.
Review: As a literature-starved expatriate, this book was the first in a long time to satisfy my need lose myself in a novel--I read the whole thing in one sitting. Though apprehensive about this title after having slogged through the horribly trite Poisonwood Bible, I found Prodigal Summer much closer in tone to an earlier Barbara Kingsolver. Not as original or unique as The Bean Trees or Pigs in Heaven, but definately a worthwhile read.

Rating: 4 stars
Summary: calling all enviromentalists & preservationists
Review: Prodigal Summer is 444 pages in length.That's not to say the book isn't worth reading. There are three stories here that eventually blend themelves together. The story takes place in southern Appalachia.The first characters are a wildlife biologist and her coyote hunting/ drifter boyfriend who form a unusual alliance. The second group of characters are a widowed farmers wife and her cold in laws who are trying to figure one another out. And then there are Nannie & Garnett. Two elderly feuding neighbors who have totally opposite views on life and who constantly debate about, pesticides, god, and the world in general. The book tells a story of human nature and nature itself. There are constant themes that deal with the issues of enviromentalism and preservation.I personally loved nannie & garnett. The two feuding elderly neighbors. Especially the part in the book when Garnett has an encounter with a turtle. This isn't a book for everyone.However those who have a deep love and appreciation for the enviroment, should enjoy this book. Barbara Kingsolver has been able to take a serious issue and form it into a enjoyable read.

Rating: 1 stars
Summary: Very disappointing
Review: Sad to have a writer I have liked so much (Animal Dreams, Pigs in Heaven) go downhill so badly. Her simplistic, pedantic and repetitive preaching about the environment, combined with flat, predictable characters (except for the old guy with the chestnut trees) made for a very disappointing read. And the hormonal coupling only added tedium. I suffered through to the end just to verify the really obvious conclusions. What happened to in-depth character development and a unique, demanding story line that requires readers to develop their own ideas and reach their own conclusions? Too bad... but at least I have a new Alice Hoffman book to read.

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: Favorite since Poisonwood
Review: My favorite book so far this year ... and since reading Poisonwood last fall. The language is lovely and the stories compelling. I couldn't put it down! So far this single copy has been read by five people. We've all felt the same!

Rating: 2 stars
Summary: Good Beach Reading, Maybe
Review: Talked about damned with faint praise! By page 143 I still hadn't decided if I liked this book. I skipped many pages of didactic speechifying (isn't there a rule about good fiction Showing Not Telling?) on Ecology, Nature, Man's Role in the Universe, et cetera. Yawn. I liked the sex scenes, though Erica Jong did the zipless .... 25 years ago so it's hardly an original concept. Also I am heartily tired of Kingsolver making people disappear or die so that main characters get to undergo heart-warming emotional make-overs. The ending was predictable (I predicted them all, not that Kingsolver wasn't sprinkling plenty of clues). STILL ... I felt I'd had a satisfying beach novel sort of read when I was done. Considering that Kingsolver is supposed to be one of our "intellectual" popular novelists, I'm surprised at her corny plots and relentlessly PC attitudes. I also found Lusa's ethnicity to be laughable. I'm sure somewhere in the world there's an adult child of a Holocaust survivor and a Palestinian, but Lusa has to carry way too much weight as an exemplar of the magic of human cross-pollination (so to speak) for my tastes. All in all, a light read about heavy topics.

Rating: 4 stars
Summary: A novel of environmental issues
Review: If I were to write a review having read only the first section of PRODIGAL SUMMER, I would have panned it. In highly descriptive prose, Kingsolver starts out with a middle aged woman (and forest ranger) being tracked by a much younger and of course good-looking hunter, the result being a kind of Joyce Carol Oates meets THE BRIDGES OF MADISON COUNTY. However, I'm happy to report the novel strengthens tremendously as it unfolds.

Kingsolver follows the lives of three characters during a particularly lush, hot summer in Appalachia, where American chestnuts and red wolves once flourished. Deanna, the forest ranger, is caught between her lover and protecting the den of coyotes he wants to locate and destroy. In the valley below, the recently widowed Lusa struggles with the ill will of her in-laws as she searches for ways to keep the family land her husband left her. And in another section of farmland, elderly Garnett feuds with Nannie over Nannie's organic farming methods, which Garnett disdains and sees as a threat to his own reputation and methods. Lusa's story is the most compelling, perhaps because Kingsolver reserves most of her opinions about the care of the environment for the other two tales, instead focusing on more personal matters. Still, the other two are told well, with strong, flowing prose. Kingsolver connects these three points-of-view mostly by the land they inhabit, but also by past histories. Although the main characters live out their dramas in isolation from the others, their lives touch upon one another in subtle ways and understandings.

This novel is heavily thematic, even occasionally dogmatic, so if this kind of writing leaves you cold, don't waste your money. However, if you're the type who likes a fictional journey coupled with political issues, this may be exactly what you're looking for. People interested in environmental issues as well as those interested in Kingsolver's progress as a novelist should read this book.

Rating: 1 stars
Summary: Couldn't finish this book
Review: I have read all of Kingsolver's books, and I think that the quality of her writing is going continuously downward. The writing I found to be so cliché-ish, I could not stomach reading more than the first 80 pages. Because the plot seemed so predictable, and the characters so flat, I went to the last 20 pages, certain I knew what would happen anyway. What happened in between could not even have been as good as I imagined. I was disappointed even with the last 20 pages. I think Kingsolver is probably a better writer than this book showed. It seemed she was either writing quickly to meet a publisher's deadline, or writing the book with the hopes that a film could be made of it.

Rating: 2 stars
Summary: Nature romance lacks originality
Review: My first Kingsolver novel ... expected much more than formulaic prose where we 1) meet experts of a certain field who 2) confront enemies 3) who conquer and divide quite easily, etc. The book was predictable, and the characters were cliche-ish. The women had the expected traits of feminine heroism, yet with sensitivity towards all life forms. I barely made it through this book. I love nature writing, yet this was overstated, hardly philosophical, except in a very cliche-ish overstated way. The minor characters, the townspeople, were very one-dimensional, portrayed very narrowly, not a complex group at all. The major characters were differentiated from them in a superficial way. If you want to read a much better book which explores themes within nature read "Pilgrim at Tinker Creek" by Annie Dillard.

Rating: 4 stars
Summary: Wonderful Summer Read
Review: Prodigal Summer. I loved it. I acknowledge that it's kind of preachy. This comes, I think, from her writing methods, which, I hear, are to get the idea first, and to imagine the character which can best mouth the idea. All of her characters start as ideas. One can feel it. I also was amazed at the accurate description of menopause and how it mimics pregnancy. When I first skipped a period, I had all the symptoms of pregnancy; I was sure I was. Her descriptions rang true to my own experience.

My husband pointed out how the scenes move visually. Imagine you are hovering like a satellite about that valley and mountain, and the four voices rotate...each scene is physically adjacent to the next, although one doesn't realize that until halfway through. I love the way surnames emerge and one realizes the connections. Even the furniture connects them! (The two chairs put out for the trash; one winds up on the ranger's front porch, the other appears somewhere else as well.)

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: Her Finest Achievement
Review: The books written by Barbara Kingsolver are each so different, that I really didn't know what to expect in this novel. What a wonderful surprise! The book weaves a rich tapestry of the separate lives of three sets of characters in the woods and farmland in the Appalachians. For the first third of the book or so, the three parallel story lines are each interesting but seem to bear no relationship to each other; but gradually loose threads are picked from each story line and woven into a whole that symbolizes the richness and complexity of people and natural surroundings of this region.

Deanna Wolfe is an aging, reclusive scientist who has accepted an assignment with the Forest Service to live in a remote cabin and rebuild trails. Through her eyes, we are exposed to the wonders of nature and the awe with which she treats the environment. Her passion (and her doctoral thesis) is the study and preservation of coyotes; Eddie Bondo, a much younger man, hikes into her life one day and opens her heart, but she is constantly suspicious of him because he believes coyotes should be shot since they threaten farm animals.

Lusa is a recently widowed young woman thrust into the life of a farmer when she inherits the family farm from her husband. The rest of the family is slow to accept her, and her unconventional ideas about farming do nothing to bond her to the family or the community. But she gradually finds a way to win them over, and learns to love the land and make a success of her farming ventures while others are struggling.

Garnett and Nannie are long-feuding elderly neighbors, who continue to keep their distance from each other more out of old habits than for any definable reasons. Witnessing the gradual dismantling of the barriers between them is amusing and heartwarming.

The ending was unusual and seemed abrupt, but after thinking about it a while I realized that the masterful novelist has left each of us to write our own endings. She brings all these characters together after devoting 444 pages to fleshing them out, and now we get to decide how their lives will progress. I was so involved with the characters that I constantly think about them, even now, weeks after I've finished the novel. I'm sure I'll read this book again and again to rediscover the fantastic environment and fascinating characters revealed to us by Barbara Kingsolver.


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