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.
From her outpost in an isolated mountain cabin, Deanna Wolfe, a reclusive wildlife biologist, watches a den of coyotes that have recently migrated into the region. She is caught off-guard by a young hunter who invades her most private spaces and confounds her self-assured, solitary life. On a farm several miles down the mountain, 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 that has become her own. 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 possibilities of a future neither of them expected.
Over the course of one humid summer, these characters find their connections to one another and to the flora and fauna with whom they share a place.
This was my first Barbara Kingsolver novel, and it certainly will not be my last. I can never be sure about popular literary fiction; is it a good novel or just a novel that a bunch of pretentious people like to project onto? This one is the former. Kingsolver has a way of putting you right in the heart of an Appalachian summer even if there’s snow falling outside your window. Her descriptive imagery is so fresh and powerful, and it’s what really drew me in as I started this one. If it had been a novel with only descriptions of nature, that would be fine by me. Not only does she do this well, but she also has a way of characterizing the main actors in a way that is so real and raw. I had no hope for any of the characters to go through a metamorphosis at the start, yet they did in the most empowering way. There wasn’t one character whom I couldn’t find something within to empathize with.
In this novel, Kingsolver very expertly weaves a web of humans and nature, putting us back into our place in the “wild” world. It would be very easy to trivialize human existence in the grand scheme of the natural world, but with this, she really puts the emphasis on every single part of the connections living things have to one another. In this way, she really does glorify human life and mortality, along with every other life on the planet.
I spent the last 60 pages of this novel feeling so giddy and excited to be part of this world, something that has been hard to find with all the death and evil that surround human existence right now. It really is a glorious read from start to finish. I cannot recommend this enough, and I certainly need to read more of her work.
Have you read any Barabara Kingsolver? Which of hers should I read next?
Louise Reads 