literary fiction – Louise Reads

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.

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Have you read any Barabara Kingsolver? Which of hers should I read next?

This is one of those subjectively-objectively good books that I could not possibly rate lower than four stars. The story, spanning space and time of life on and off Earth, was at times both touching and disturbing.

I picked this one up because it was pitched as a story similar to Cloud Atlas. While I didn’t enjoy Cloud Atlas as much, I did appreciate the story format, and this book’s premise was much more promising to me. The story format of How High We Go in the Dark was very similar, and I did end up enjoying the actual storyline more.

The writing was really moving. Sequoia is really great at driving home the feeling of connection across space and time. I felt a strong connection through his writing to societal issues we are dealing with today, with the pandemic and aside from it. I had chills reading the final piece of this story. So, objectively, this was a very beautiful book, and I would recommend it to all interested in literary fiction.

The reason I could not give this book 5 stars is because of the focus these kinds of stories have on the plot. Sequoia did a good job of fleshing out characters in the limited time we have with them and connecting them to others in the story, but it was obviously very hard to feel connected to these characters with the time-jumps every chapter.

This issue comes with the territory when telling the story of many different people at different times, and others will likely be more interested in a story that is plot-focused.

For me, I need to have a deep or growing connection to characters to care about the plot, which just was not going to happen in this story. I found myself putting this one down often when the middle especially became too dense with different characters and plot points. This does not mean an issue with the book—I just have different reading preferences.

Despite this, I can appreciate the story and am glad I read it.

Rating: ★★★★