Prodigal Summer: A Novel

I thoroughly enjoyed this book about farm life in the Appalachia. The stories start out as separate pieces, but then eventually start to intertwine just a little. There are a lot of other reviews that have done a great job summarizing the book so I am just going to leave some thoughts.I didn’t buy the Deanna and Eddie Bondo romance. The parts where she was having deep discussions with him about the importance of coyotes or when she was wondering the woods herself were so beautiful and detailed that I just loved getting lost in the book. However, I had a hard time believing that she would even want to be intimate with someone so against her personal beliefs. It did not make Eddie at all a very appealing person to me and it made me wonder how she could stand him being around. He was almost an intruder in my opinion and the story may have been more intriguing if he were.After Cole died, Lusa looks into putting together a goat herd to sell the meat to her family in New York City. I loved that Kingsolver had this character do something original. After having a long conversation about it with Little Rickie, you would think that she would need his help getting the goats. Instead, Kingsolver skipped over this and she just went and got the goats herself and it all seemed pretty seamless. It would have been interesting to hear more about the new challenges of raising goats; especially being an inexperienced farmer. I would have loved for Rickie to be 18 or 19 and Kingsolver blossoming that romance a little more.The introspective discussion after Eddie killed a turkey left me wishing I was there to say a few things. On page 325, Eddie kills a turkey in the woods. Deanna writes it off saying that it was a male and probably was old or sick enough that it would have made a meal for a bobcat or other predator on the mountain. Eddie teases her surprised she is not a vegetarian for all her talk about caring for the animals on the mountain. She says the concept of vegetarianism is not so simple, because to farm wheat a lot of animals get killed by the machinery. I know this is Kingsolver’s opinion being inserted here, but vegetarianism and veganism is not about purity, it’s about doing the least amount of harm in this world as possible. Much of the grains that are grown are to feed animals that are raised for meat. Less meat, less wheat, less mice and rabbits that are killed and probably more forests don’t need to be cut down. Also, earlier Deanna talks about cats being unnatural predators. I agree with this; however, in this discussion about the turkey, how are humans not also considered unnatural predators? Wasn’t she denying the bobcat or coyote a meal?The meditations on ecology, wildlife preservation, forests, and organic farming made me believe this was a better environmental novel than Overstory. I read Overstory and even though that book started out pretty good, it petered out for me as if the author got bored with the story and the characters. This book held my attention the entire time as if Kingsolver was in love with the story and all the details. This book deserved an award.Last, an epilogue would have been nice. I did not really like the last chapter of the book. I didn’t understand it. I would have loved instead for there to be an epilogue on what happens to these characters after ten years. If I could write it, Deanna and her daughter inherit Nannie Rawley’s farm and she continues to grow organic produce. Garnett’s grandchildren continue with the Chestnut farm and they achieve the beginnings of a grove that is free of Chestnut blight. Lusa and Rickie after a few years eventually do marry and start a family continuing the Widener name on the ancestral farm. I think the stories were all going in this direction, but it would have been nice to see the narratives through to the end.

“Prodigal Summer” showcases some of Barbara Kingsolver’s loveliest descriptive prose but is hampered by too many characters preaching their gospel of environmentalism. I love the social conscience exhibited in all of Kingsolver’s work but having not just one but three characters driving home her message of environmental responsibility stole some of the magic from her solid storytelling.The novel unfolds through alternating chapters about three characters living on the land in rural Appalachia. Deanna is a park ranger with a passion for nature living alone on a mountain until a hunter who might as well be called Fantasy Man shows up. Lusa is a young woman adjusting to widowhood and her in-laws while struggling to find an earth-friendly way to make her farm solvent. Garnett Walker is an “old fart” with little patience for the independence and organic methods of his neighbor even while he struggles to revive the American chestnut trees on his own property. Each chapter deftly advances these three stories and ends in cliffhangers that made me want to read on. Ultimately, the author reveals how all the characters are connected.Throughout, Kingsolver offers lush descriptions of the beauty and fecundity of nature in summertime while her characters deal with the human desires unleashed by the season. Her prose is superb. After a hard rain, the dripping leaves of the forest echo with a “sibilant percussion.” A blacksnake "oozed" down the wall of a log cabin “in an undulating flow like a line of molasses spilling over the edge of a pitcher.” The plotting and pace are excellent and I laughed out loud quite a few times at funny observations or situations. My only problem is that too many characters descend into long-winded lectures on the necessity for humans to adopt more earth-friendly environmental practices. A lighter touch would have conveyed that important message more effectively and made this a sleeker, superior 5 star book.

I had cause to reread this novel many years after first reading it. The novel comprises three loosely intertwined story lines of three strong, eco-minded women all living in a rural, mountainous region of Virginia. Each story line is engaging, and each woman well portrayed. The book is lush with biological detail, drawing parallels between the biology of various species and human biology. This is the essence of much of Kingsolver’s writing and is somewhat of a trademark. This novel is particularly heavily seeped in biology/ecology, which is balanced with personal, human stories, but the biological “lessons” may become too prevalent for some readers.

The novel will take you away from the every day.

This novel captured all my heart. The book alternates between three stories whose links gradually emerge, set in a tiny community of 600 people where, every person is somehow linked to the few inhabitants of the area as well as intimately linked to the nature that surrounds them.First there is Deanna Wolfe, a 47-year-old biologist who lives in a log cabin payed to scour the National Forest land for poachers while keeping track of her beloved coyotes that settle nearby. The divorcee's two-year solitude is interrupted by Eddie Bondo, a sheep farmer 20 years her junior, who reconnects her with her physical needs for proximity and social companionship.Secondly there is Lusa Landowski, a city-born entomologist married to Cole Widener whose family makes it very hard for her to settle. The day personal tragedy strikes, she gradually finds a way to love the area, to find her own calling and grows closer to her five sisters-in-law and their children.Thirdly, there is the elderly Garnett Walker whose main purpose in life is to revive the American chestnut tree, made extinct by loggers and fungal blight, while warring with his neighbour, Nannie Rawley. Here again, the story evolves beautifully and the two neighbours grow to accept and help each other in ways they could not anticipate initially.The three main women protagonists have in common their fierce independence and strength of personality and the novel insists convincingly on the shared animality of humans, regardless of their efforts to subdue nature. The descriptions of the passing seasons, the fecundity of the earth and beauty of the surrounding woodlands is rendered so well that I was captured by every single page of this book.Highly recommended!

Well written and covering interesting female characters.

This author is outstanding and has proved this yet again with this well-researched, interesting novel. Her character descriptions are first class and very easy to imagine. I was gripped and lucky enough to be on holiday, so was able to spend happy hours every day reading through this book.

Just like all the other Kingsolver's novels I've read, a page turner. I've enjoyed the subtle intertwining of the characters' lives. The characters are so well defined that you feel like you know them and at the end of the book I was missing them. Fantastic book.