Rating: 
Summary: Not Poisonwood, but still well worth a read
Review: I am not giving this book 5 stars for several reasons, even though I thoroughly enjoyed it and was disappointed to have it end (not to mention a big fan). First, it became very predictable about midway through. Second, it sits on the border of preachiness. This is my biggest complaint of Kingsolver's works (with the exception of Poisonwood). The Bean Trees remains my least favorite of her novels for this reason. However, it doesn't diminish what Kingsolver has done here.The character Deanna bears a striking (and disappointing) similarity to the heroin of "The Loop"; woman alone in the woods after a relationship breakup obsessed with wild canines and pursued by a younger man. However, Kingsolver takes the same ecological themes of that book a level deeper and does it with her unmatched lyrical prose. While "The Loop" focused mainly on mammals, Prodigal Summer explores plants (I learned a great deal about the American Chestnut), insects (likewise about moths), as well as mammals. It brought to my mind the similarities between humans and coyotes. We are both omnivores and opportunists, move into any available crack or crevice, and are difficult to get rid of. And then there is steam! Can you say hot? Can we really expect everything she writes post-Poisonwood to be as intense? Relax and enjoy this book for what it is - a delightful frolic rich in loosely woven characters and Kingsolverisms. If you haven't read any of her books, start now!
Rating:
Summary: It's ALL about the birds and the bees!
Review: Kingsolver gives us a brief glimpse into the lives of three groups of people who live near each other in that lost land of Appalachia somewhere between Kentucky and West Virginia. Yes, dear readers... where "hillbillies" come from! To tell any more about the characters would ruin the story for you who have not had the pleasure of reading it. These three groups of people live near each other, but barely recognize the existence of each other. They co-habitate, just as the insect, plant and animal life around them do. During this prodigal summer, survival and contact with each other, whether it be man, beast or insect seems to dominate all thought. Just as it always has and always will. Kingsolver brings us ever closer to realizing how much all we life forms share this basic instinct of survival that is common to all forms of life. Her story reminds us in such an admirably subtle way. A clever and talented writer Kingsolver is, indeed. She gives me the impression that she may consistently lead us through a fictitious story, telling us about a small portion of someone's life and make it so very interesting. There is no point "A" or "B" that all the characters come from and get to. There's no conspiracy or plot or mystery... it's just a simple, clean folk story that sometimes makes us chuckle over human behavior. I recommend this story to dear reader who tires of the same old story written by different authors and I look forward to her next creation.
Rating: 
Summary: Good story idea that grows repetitious.
Review: I was disappointed in this book because it didn't deliver what it promised. I'm interested in her topics: ecology, the plight of the small American farmer and wildlife. However, the story doesn't develop very well. Kingslover is too long-winded, wordy with long descriptions that are not particularly scholarly or informative; consequently, the book becomes one long serman. Plus the characters are not developed enough to be real. My advice is skip this one. My question is what happened to that wonderful writer who gave us "Pigs in Heaven"?
Rating:
Summary: Get over it!
Review: Okay, it's not Poisonwood Bible! But it's a great read.
Rating: 
Summary: A celebration of nature and womanhood.
Review: This book takes a big risk, but succeeds wonderfully. It's a passionate celebration of nature and womanhood -- and, in the broadest sense, a highly political one -- and it would be easy to say it goes over the top. But taken for what it is, it hits home triumphantly. If there's a naivete to it, it's a deliberate naivete. She makes no apologies for celebrating the lives of the three women whose stories are braided together here, and for providing the clearly well-researched lessons about the intricate interplays of the natural world that are central to those stories.
Rating: 
Summary: A Mixed Review
Review: Barbara Kingsolver has been my favorite author ever since I discovered Animal Dreams, so I was eager to read Prodigal Summer. I think that this is the book she wanted to write for a long time, but it wouldn't have gotten past an editor until the success of Poisonwood Bible. There are surely moments of lyrical writing on every page, and I regularly gasped (yes, gasped!) in appreciation of her language. That said, I felt like I was reading LaVyrle Spencer or Danielle Steele, not that I do, way too often. Her message got way ahead of her medium. I loved Garnett and Nannie, but Lusa and Deanna felt plastic. I agree fully with Kingsolver's world view, and will recommend this book to fellow readers, with the caveat that they should not expect Kingsolver's best work, but surely one of her most passionate.
Rating:
Summary: A History Of The Senses
Review: "Prodigal Summer" is the second novel by Barbara Kingsolver that I have read.The first novel "Poisonwood Bible",is a hard act to follow.In the novel,"Prodigal Summer",Ms. Kingsolver succeeds in exposing the reader to her educational background in biology. I also found the writing rich in the imagery of the five senses.When Ms. Kingsolver talks about a honeysuckle branch breaking, you hear the crack, and the scent released in the air ,you take a long deep breath.Her prose is untouchable. The novel is both sensual and educational.What the novel is lacking in is the development of the characters' stories ,you want to know more but are given another lesson in biology, farming and ecology.
Rating:
Summary: The birds and the bees -- literally.
Review: Moths are doing it, birds are doing it, coyotes, goats, even chestnut trees are doing it. And of course, the human characters are no exception. This is a book about the lifecycle: birth, death, reproduction, nature's weeding out of the weak in favor of the strong. It is about the urge to put forth one's own genes, or at the very least, one's own privates. Barbara Kingsolver (my long-time favorite author) puts forth her own beliefs, in a work that is very enjoyable, if a bit preachy. It has sucessfully changed the way I think about nature. It has given me hours of entertainment. It has not given me a compelling story about characters that I am truly happy with. In this book, three stories are told in parallel, and I kept waiting for them to intersect or collide. While there are mentions of the others in each, they never fully blend. If this is a story about the coyotes and the community, it needed to take more of a foreground position (it makes an *amazing* background). If this is a story about the people, why is there no real interaction by the end? In short, I feel I've just finished reading the first *half* of a very good novel. This is in no way her best, but the sequel has great potential, should there be one. For the record, I've read all Kingsolver's fiction, and would rank "Animal Dreams" as the most entertaining, and "Poisonwood Bible" as the most ambitious and well-written. "High Tide in Tuscon" was my least favorite, and "Prodigal Summer" goes one above that. Still, I'd recommend it to many of my vegetarian and/or animal loving friends. And I'll probably buy a couple of copies as holiday gifts.
Rating:
Summary: A Compelling Peaceable Kingdom
Review: What's not to love about the novels of Barbara Kingsolver? In beneficent books like ''The Bean Trees,'' ''Pigs in Heaven,'' and ''Animal Dreams,'' she creates vivid domestic utopias, usually influenced by the wild landscapes of rural Appalachia or sun bleached Arizona, where she declares herself pro organic gardening and antiwar, in favor of good sex and against rudeness. In the beckoning kingdom of Kingsolver, thinking women (sexy even with their middle aged bodies and stubborn ways), responsive men (sexy even when impermanent), and free range children (handfuls but always worth it) can live in harmony, breathe clean air, and listen to National Public Radio. She offers a balm, a seductive glimpse of an abundant Eden near at hand for even the least spectacular, least perfect, least wrinkle free of readers. After the exciting, rewarding leap she took with the bestselling ''Poisonwood Bible,'' away from home canning and deep into the lives of an American missionary family in the Belgian Congo of the 1960s, the new novel is a return to Kingsolver's ''classic'' style and subject matter. We're back in fertile southern Appalachia, in Zebulon County, in a season so glorious with dappled things as to leap right out of a Gerard Manley Hopkins poem. And up and down the valley, women and coyotes are sniffing the air. Literally. In the mountains, pheromones fly when Deanna, a solitary wildlife biologist who champions nature's predators for their underappreciated contribution to ecological balance (she's divorced, not yet 50), meets a much younger man, a hunter, while each is tracking the elusive coyote, canis latrans. In the hollow, Lusa, a young farmer's widow (a splashy multicultural mix, half Palestinian and half Polish Jewish, not yet 30) unknots the tangles of distrust that separate her from her late husband's firmly rooted kin. Across the county, Nannie, an old nonconformist lady (not yet 80, her orchard pesticide free), bickers with the fusty old widower next door. It will come as no surprise to her acolytes that Kingsolver eventually twines all three of these admirable specimens of feminine self actualization, and that coyotes are seen and heard regularly. Blended and otherwise do it yourself postnuclear family groupings have always enchanted Kingsolver, as has the interconnectedness of humans and the rest of the natural world. The mating habits of a luna moth, the marvelous secrets revealed in animal droppings, and the best thing to do when surprised by a deadly copperhead snake equally inspire her, and the writer's prose sings sweetest when she's closely observing the earth with no thought to making poetry. Of an oak tree upended by a storm, she notices, ''the fallen tree still burgeoned with glossy oak leaves -- probably still trying to scatter its pollen to the wind and set acorns as if its roots were not straggling in the breeze and its bulk doomed to firewood.'' But then, goodness gracious, Lusa has deep thoughts like, ''We're only what we are: a woman cycling with the moon, and a tribe of men trying to have sex with the sky.'' And Kingsolver herself has palpitations over Deanna's intense erotic response to her young lover/ hunter. (''She could not remember a more compelling combination of features on any man she'd ever seen.'') When they go to bed for the first time, ''It was the body's decision, a body with no more choice of its natural history than an orchid has, or the bee it needs, and so they would both get lost here, she would let him in, anywhere he wanted to go.'' Cue the birds, the bees, the coyote's wail, and pour yourself a mug of mint tea--a luscious literary view of women.
Rating:
Summary: The Natural World in all its Glory
Review: A brilliant book that will appeal to biologists and literary fanatics alike. It attempts to reverse the old maxim of art imitating life as it is an activist environmental work. The lesson is that man and nature must learn to coexist, told only how a biologist writer could do. For those who have been lost in the world of concrete and skyscrapers, this will remind you of the wonders of the natural world. And as icing on the cake, the book has some good humor as well.
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