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Summary: Sex, sex, and more sex, plus a little about diet
Review: Barbara Kingsolver is an observational biologist, enamoured of the natural world and all of God's creatures. And it shows. This is the second novel and third book I've read by Ms. Kingsolver, the first being The Poisonwood Bible and the book of essays, High Tide in Tucson, and is the set in her native Kentucky. Or is the setting Tennessee or West Virginia? Anyway, the action all takes place in and near a small rural community called Egg Creek and on Zebulon mountain or at its foot. The main human characters are three strong women and one very shakey old man surrounded by a cast of characters which, with the exception of the not quite believable Eddie Bondo, will be easily recognized by those of us who grew up in isolated rural communities. You can get the gist of the plot by reading any of the scores of reviews already on this list. But what the book is really about is life's appetite for sex and food. Observational biologists, those whose main studies are in reproduction of species and where they live, what their eat, and how they interact with the other species in their environment, as a group are a pretty prurient lot, and Kingsolver is no exception. She obviously knows a lot about sexual reproduction, which is the answer to the age old question, "why are we here and how did we come to be like this?" Every page drips with sex, sex among bugs, salamanders, people, goats, cows, puff balls, butteflys, moths, the American chestnut, various fungi and cayotes to name just a very few among this saturnalia of pleasure and fecundity. Kingsolver makes D.H. Lawrence look life a prudish Victorian and Henry Miller a school boy. They should know so much about sex! Kingsolver mixes the mystery of love and male/female attraction along with all this in what is an overwhelmingly moral tome. If you want to understand something about the harm we are doing ourselves and the planet and the terrible danger facing our progeny, read the Prodigal Summer. wfh
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Summary: is this the same person who wrote the poisonwood bible?
Review: I've loved Kingsolver's work for years... Animal Dreams and The Poisonwood Bible really struck me with their rich language and beautiful passages.Prodigal Summer, on the other hand... ugh. I only got about ten pages in and had to quit. I am biased; I'll admit that. Intensive nature descriptions bore me to tears. I love the outdoors, but I'd rather go outside and look at a tree than read about one. Therefore, I was sent into blahsville reading the nature prose. The dialogue also felt awkward and I was given the uneasy feeling i had stumbled into some kind of nature/cheesy romance story. So I stopped reading. I would suggest you read any of Kingsolver's other novels. If you want fun read The Bean Trees, if you want serious and enriching read The Poisonwood Bible.
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Summary: It's a masterpiece.
Review: With all due respect, I completely disagree with the reviewer who called the female characters "annoying." I guess it shows how people are different. I found them just about as completely the opposite of annoying as any characters out there. (I found Lusa, especially, utterly charming; the others are appealing, too, just not in any typical mainstream way.) I'd always avoided Barbara Kingsolver's books, because if EVERYONE seems to like a book, it usually leaves me cold--seems formulaic, mainstream, nothing special--something. But in this case, I was doing myself a disservice. There are lots of entertaining books out there, in a shallow sort of way, but my gut response to this one was recognizing it as a rare masterpiece. I don't give a hoot about the "socially responsible whatever" that one reviewer said this author espouses (well, I do care, but I don't require it in literature!). It is just a brilliant work--it totally catches you up--or it did me--and takes you in to the story. It's wildly beautiful, sexy, vivid, intelligent, moving--funny. I was incredibly impressed. The bottom line, for any thoughtful reader who has heretofor avoided Barbara Kingsolver because of her mainstream success--please check this out! There's nothing "average" about this book--it's brilliant. She has to be one of the best writers we have, and I can't imagine her books--if her others are anything like this!--won't stand the test of time. My hat is COMPLETELY off to her--and I sure am grateful for the uncommonly delightful experience of this book.
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Summary: I love it, I own it, I buy it for my friends. You should too
Review: If I were to rank Barbara Kingsolvers novels, I would add Prodigal Summer to the top of the list along with The Bean Trees. It is fantastic fun. There are multiple characters with unexpected depth and sometimes shallowness. We are allowed to get to know the characters, their families, their environment and enjoy most every step of the way. This book enjoys the sensual side of nature, both human and animal, constantly relating the two. The only thing that made me step out of the world she was creating was that I've never encountered so many women in one setting who were so totally in touch with their fertility. I'm not saying its a bad thing, and perhaps it says something about how in touch we aren't with the nature in ourselves. A good place to start getting in touch is with this novel. I feel that while she still displays a strong pro-nature stance through her characters and settings, it's revealed from many different aspects, both positive and negative, human and non-human. She doesn't shout out from a soapbox the ideology of sustainable living, but instead offers her characters a chance to develop their own particular way of living with both themselves and nature in a way that doesn't beat the reader over the head. (Some of her other works, while still great, have this tendency.) This book has received rave reviews from my book club friends as well. Their feelings were mixed about the epic Poisonwood Bible, but this one is a sure keeper. Buy it and read it until it's destroyed, then buy another copy. It's that good.
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Summary: the audiotapes are a rare pleasure.
Review: If you enjoy listening to audiotapes as you go about your daily chores, this one is a rare pleasure. Barbara Kingsolver is a wonderful writer (forgive me, you probably already know this, but this is the first of her works I've ever "read"!). Apparently she used to work as a copy editor, and it shows in her work--the clarity, just the right words, and that's only the beginning of what makes this a truly great book. If you have an affinity for nature and the outdoors, and are a sucker for unusual characters, unusual romances that ring true (yes, this is an enchantingly, whimsically romantic book!), you will be caught up happily for many hours in these tapes. I've listened to audiotapes of all kinds--essays, novels, mysteries--and can't think of ONE that has been as thoughly enjoyable as this one. And I thought I wouldn't like it, because it is SO popular--usually, if a book is a mainstream success, I have trouble relating to it. But now I'll be running to find this author's other books. A good vibe!
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Summary: The Endless Summer
Review: Barbara Kingsolver's books have been a huge commercial success, and many people will read anything she puts out simply because it's by her. Before you pick up this book, though, be aware that she has crystallized into a woman on a mission. In the belief that liberal issues of social and environmental injustice should have a commanding place in serious literary fiction, Kingsolver recently dreamed up The Bellwether Prize for Fiction to recognize her concept of socially responsible literature. To rise to this level, it isn't enough to lay out the facts and trust readers to draw the right conclusions. The writer has to spell out the right conclusions. Against this background, Kingsolver gives us Prodigal Summer, a book that takes aim at some trends affecting earth's ecosystem. Its three central themes are the value of predators in a naturally balanced world, the evils of pesticides, and the hardships of small farmers. Along the way, she provides considerable narrative about the natural world. Some reviewers enjoyed reading about nature, and to the extent Kingsolver has reminded them that the natural world exists, the book has that merit. The book takes place in a small patch of Kentucky or Tennessee in the Appalachian Mountain Range, and story lines rotate, over the course of one spring and summer, among the lives of three groups of people. First is Deanna, a 47-year-old biologist who, having come to hate the demands of people and the clamor of civilization, sought refuge in a hermitlike existence as a Forest Service caretaker of Zebulon Mountain. While tracking a group of coyotes that had migrated to her mountain, she encounters a 28-year-old muscular guy named Eddie (Kingsolver seems to like muscular men). It is spring, and the world is alive to its cycle of rebirth. The two have a physical attraction for each other that quickly, and often, finds expression. Next is Lusa, a pretty, young woman of Palestinian and Jewish heritage, and another biologist. She had come to the little valley abutting the mountain after a whirlwind romance. Within a year of her marriage, though, she finds herself a widow in ownership of a small farm, confronting four seemingly hostile sisters-in-law, and the question of whether she should leave, or stay and try to do something with the farm herself. Last there is a couple in their seventies. Nannie Rawley, a sprightly, unconventional, liberal, and knowledgeable old gal, grows fabulous organic apples in her orchard and vociferously opposes the use of pesticides. Her neighbor, Garnett Walker, is a retired vocational agriculture teacher, a breeder of hybrid chestnut trees, and, strangely, a creationist. Nannie is an everlasting thorn in his side. Despite the wealth of material available here, Prodigal Summer falls oddly flat. It doesn't meet Kingsolver's own standards for The Bellwether Prize because it cannot be considered literature, or even what is called today serious fiction. Missing are those key elements of compositional excellence and literary aesthetic. The plot is exceedingly thin. Although Nannie and Garnett provide the nexus for these tales (Nannie has a link to Deanna, and Garnett to Lusa and her family), the connections are so muted as to be insignificant. Indeed, the three stories ' each too scrawny to stand alone ' don't advance toward to a common end and never mesh together into a coherent whole. The Nannie-Garnett section is primarily a platform for Nannie (Kingsolver) to wag her finger at Garnett (us readers) and to lecture on and on about pesticides and little critters. A real case can be made for organic farming, but Kingsolver's puny arguments and her strident tone defeat that result. Casting poor Garnett as a doddering buffoon, hobbled by old-age infirmities and "backward" beliefs, may make him an easy target for Nannie, but it doesn't help Kingsolver's case. Since when is tolerance relative? It is simply not nice to ridicule someone's condition or religious beliefs. What the Deanna section lacks in storyline, it makes up for in long-windedness. Deanna inexplicably sheds her desire to be rid of people in her life, and she and Eddie have sex, sex, sex. Their relationship, though, has no emotion, no spark. As Deanna ostensibly wrote her master's thesis on coyotes, this section could have been rich with observations of these animals' behavior in the wild, but all we get are Deanna's blanket lectures. It is here that Kingsolver writes most extensively about the natural world. While her narrative is occasionally lovely, much of the time she is so painfully repetitive, and so much the harpy, that the reading is hard going. She drones on, oblivious to the beauty, the excitement, and the magic of the eastern woodlands. You'd be better off reading Rachel Carson's lyrical (and short) book, The Sense of Wonder. At least the Lusa section has the semblance of a plot, and the dialogue here is often quite fine. Regrettably, Lusa herself is an implausible character (this transplanted city girl is all of a sudden a prodigious gardener, a whiz at canning, and a better baker than her sisters-in-law's mother?). Dramatic opportunities sail by, unexplored. And her brainstorm for paying the farm's expenses struck me as preposterous. I opened Prodigal Summer in happy expectation: I agree with her central tenets, and I love the area in which the book is set. Alas, I found sanctimonious female characters who give new meaning to the word annoying. I found science that is watery and sometimes suspect. And I found writing so tedious, so rambling, and so lacking in plot or drama that it took me weeks to finish the thing. All in all, this book struck me as a lazy work, where the basic elements of fiction have been abandoned in favor of feeble ideological bleating.
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Summary: Perfect prose weaves tapestry connecting lives of Appalacia
Review: My description of this novel will not do it justice. Kingsolver has been steadily perfecting her prose from "The Bean Trees" through "The Poisonwood Bible". Here, through beautiful dialogue and magical imagery, she tells three different tales of lives--human and non-human--interconnected in the Zebulon Forest. Kingsolver's novel begins with a description of Deanna, a reclusive biologist working as a forest inspector. She is a comfortable, 47-year-old misanthrope, preferring coyote to man, and the companionship of non-human animals, especially predators, above all else. Enter Eddie Bondo: a 28-year-old sheep rancher from Wyoming bent on hunting coyotes. Deanna and Eddie share a passionate, but adversarial romance over the course of the summer. During the same summer, at the end of the Zebulon Forest, Lusa Maluf Landowski loses her new husband in a truck accident. She is left with the family farm she never wanted to begin with, and the task of somehow finding her place in his close-knit family of sisters, who distrust outsiders generally and the Muslim/Jewish scientist Lusa particularly. Down the road, Garnett Walker is engaged in his life's work: developing a new species of chestnut tree that can withstand blight and produce wood sturdy enough to witness the progress of many generations. A lifelong farmer himself, he describes his lifelong exasperation with Nannie Rawley, an organic apple farmer who had a baby out of wedlock many years ago, who is embraced by the townfolk despite her unconventionality--or perhaps because of it. Through family ties, chances of acquaintance and common histories, these three stories are intricately interwoven despite their characters' limited interaction with each other during the course of the novel. Kingsolver's theme is the connection people have to each other through happenstance and fortune. Her larger theme is the connection people and all animals have to the earth. People are only one form of life, sharing the earth with so many. A single predator in a world of plants and animals, cities and countries, forests and farms. Read this novel not only for its message, but for the beautiful language. Kingsolver's description of a luna moth is so glorious it makes you want to cry. She will make you want to open your eyes and give every honeysuckle, snake, bird, and coyote its due.
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Summary: Beautiful.....
Review: Although I enjoyed the other Kingsolver book I read (Poisonwood Bible), I didn't find it quite as compelling as Prodigal Summer. I adored this book - not in the least because I'm a city-bred western girl, and Unitarian no less (if you've read the book you get this), who finds herself plopped down in a rural area on the edge of Appalachia. I think I have a much better understanding of and appreciation for the people around me now, through the kind offices of Ms. Kingsolver's book. I was interested in some of the other reviews whose writers saw three love stories set against the marvelous backdrop of nature. I saw three individual human stories that include, but don't revolve around, love - set out in such a way that I could relate them directly to the natural world around them. All three of the human protagonists grow as people through the events of the book - and all through interaction with both other humans and the natural world. Old chestnuts are hard to crack and old Mr. Walker has to find a way to break through his tough outer hide to see new ideas and allow himself the sunshine new thoughts and ideas. Lusa, like her moths, needs to emerge from her chrysalis of widowhood, grief, and family assumptions, to figure out who she is now and where she needs to be. And Deanna, who reveres nature, needs to allow herself to be a part of it - as messy as it is. Each story is intertwined with the others and with the fourth protagonist, nature herself, in surprising and satisfying ways. I laughed out loud several times and I wept a little too. I intend to read this again very soon, and highly recommend it.
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Summary: Try the Audio Version!
Review: I expected to like this book. I'm at B. K. fan. What I didn't expect was the added pleasure of listening to the author read the book. Normally, author-read tapes are disastrous (nasal, monotone, etc.) but Barbara Kingsolver has a melodious voice and a range of dialects, most of which are very good. The book did get slightly eco-preachy at times but the stories were worth listening to a little of this. I especially liked the story of Lusa and the relationships she developed with her in-laws.
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Summary: A Sensual Story With Muscle
Review: I have a hunger for words, and for nature writing, that only Kingsolver knows how to feed. In non-fiction, that hunger often moves me to pluck an Annie Dillard volume from the shelves... in fiction, it frequently moves me to open a novel by Barbara Kingsolver. She always satisfies. With her background as a biologist, Kingsolver always teaches me something I did not know about the natural world around us - and in us. As her characters in "Prodigal Summer" know so well, we are one with this planet we live on. Abuse it, and we abuse ourselves. Nurture it, and we nurture ourselves. Her message of respect for the intricate and wonderful plan of nature is strong, but not overpowering. It is neither didactic nor preachy. That's important. The kind of rebel spirit required today to resist both physical and spiritual pollution would resist preaching. But her passion for the beauty of earth and her fascination with how involved a chain of life we are woven into blends easily and cleanly with her skill as a fiction writer. We read a good story and we learn a bit about natural biology - and the learning is painless. The knit of the two is tight and effective. As a woman reader, I also commend this woman author's presentation of such strong female characters. Hurrah! These are sensual women, the older ones fully as much as the younger ones, and they buckle to no one. Yet strength does not mean an inability to love. Women have known this... well, forever. To allow emotion to blossom with this kind of lushness is something women have always understood as the epitome of strength. These strong women understand sacrifice. They understand, and give in with gusto and abandon to, the most sensual pleasures. This, too, is our biology, and Kingsolver writes these scenes with mastery and appetite. Her women have spunk and fire. They have tenderness in their touch as well as hard muscle. They may not be able to save the earth... but they will certainly try.
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