Type of bind: Hardcover
Format: Bargain Price
Label: HarperCollins
Manufacturer: HarperCollins
Quantity: 1
Page Count: 464
Printing Date: October 17, 2000
Publishing house: HarperCollins
Release Date: October 17, 2000
Sale Popularity Level: 1176379
Studio: HarperCollins
Other books you might be interested in perusing:
Editor's Notes and Comments:
Product Description:
Barbara Kingsolver, a writer praised for her'extravagantly gifted narrative voice' (New York Times Book Review), has created with this novel a hymn to wildness that celebrates the prodigal spirit of human nature, and of nature itself.
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. At the heart of these intertwined narratives is a den of coyotes that have recently migrated into the region. Deanna Wolfe, a reclusive wildlife biologist, watches the forest from her outpost in an isolated mountain cabin where she is caught off-guard by Eddie Bondo, a young hunter who comes to invade her most private spaces and confound her self-assured, solitary life. On a farm several miles down the mountain, another web of lives unfolds as 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. 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 complexities of a world neither of them expected.
Over the course of one humid summer, as the urge to procreate overtakes a purple and profligate countryside, these characters find connections to one another and to the flora and fauna with which they necessarily share a place. Their discoveries are embedded inside countless intimate lessons of biology, the realities of small farming, and the final, urgent truth that humans are only one part of life on earth.
With the richness that characterizes Barbara Kingsolver's finest work, Prodigal Summer embraces pure thematic originality and demonstrates a balance of narrative and ideas that only an accomplished novelist could render so beautifully.
Amazon.com Review:
There is no one in contemporary literature quite like Barbara Kingsolver. Her dialogue sparkles with sassy wit and earthy poetry; her descriptions are rooted in daily life but are also on familiar terms with the eternal. With Prodigal Summer, she returns from the Congo to a 'wrinkle on the map that lies between farms and wildness.' And there, in an isolated pocket of southern Appalachia, she recounts not one but three intricate stories.
Exuberant, lush, riotous--the summer of the novel is 'the season of extravagant procreation' in which bullfrogs carelessly lay their jellied masses of eggs in the grass, 'apparently confident that their tadpoles would be able to swim through the lawn like little sperms,' and in which a woman may learn to 'tell time with her skin.' It is also the summer in which a family of coyotes moves into the mountains above Zebulon Valley: The ghost of a creature long extinct was coming in on silent footprints, returning to the place it had once held in the complex anatomy of this forest like a beating heart returned to its body. This is what she believed she would see, if she watched, at this magical juncture: a restoration.
The 'she' is Deanna Wolfe, a wildlife biologist observing the coyotes from her isolated aerie--isolated, that is, until the arrival of a young hunter who makes her even more aware of the truth that humans are only an infinitesimal portion in the ecological balance. This truth forms the axis around which the other two narratives revolve: the story of a city girl, entomologist, and new widow and her efforts to find a place for herself; and the story of Garnett Walker and Nannie Rawley, who seem bent on thrashing out the countless intimate lessons of biology as only an irascible traditional farmer and a devotee of organic agriculture can. As Nannie lectures Garnett, 'Everything alive is connected to every other by fine, invisible threads. Things you don't see can help you plenty, and things you try to control will often rear back and bite you, and that's the moral of the story.'
Structurally, that gossamer web is the story: images, phrases, and events link the narratives, and these echoes are rarely obvious, always serendipitous. Kingsolver is one of those authors for whom the terrifying elegance of nature is both aesthetic wonder and source of a fierce and abiding moral vision. She may have inherited Thoreau's mantle, but she piles up riches of her own making, blending her extravagant narrative gift with benevolent concise humor. She treads the line between the sentimental and the glorious like nobody else in American literature. --Kelly Flynn
User popularity level:
Rated by buyers 
-
As I write this, we're heading into winter--a perfect time to read this novel and then ruminate on what your own place is in our global ecosystem. I have to admit a bias to Kingsolver's writing; she understands people and what motivates them. The Bean Trees, Animal Dreams, and Pigs in Heaven are novels that I recommend over and over to people who say, 'I want something good to read, but not something heavy.' This will be a recommended novel as well. Kingsolver always offers a small piece of life that most of us can accept graciously and then chew on thoughtfully--and her recipes are without unnecessary additives. Love that.
Rated by buyers -
There are 443 reviews of this book as I post review number 444. "Prodigal Summer" is averaging four stars at this point and I'd give it four, too. I'm not a Kingsolver completist; I've only read "Poisonwood Bible" (loved it) and "Animal, Vegetable, Miracle," which was brilliant. With "Prodigal," I'd recommend only to readers who don't mind a bit of biology class along with their plots and characters. The constant detail about mammals and bugs and reptiles and their habitats, rituals, needs and mating was, well, just a bit endless. All the major characters seem to have too much knowledge about nature. I have no problem with nature. It's one of my favorite things. But the information about every bird and goat and snake, layered in thick strands in a fairly rich and interesting plot, grew tiresome.
Here's an example. Deep into the book, Lusa is explaining about some vines. "This one's nice, though; it's supposed to grow here. It gets covered with white flowers at the end of summer, and then it makes millions of seedpods that look like little silver starbursts. It's called virgin's bower." I think you could extract key detail from throughout "Prodigal Summer" and extract another book, "Barbara Kingsolver's Fairly Random Guide To the Flora and Fauna Of Appalachia."
I don't mean to be disrespectful of Kingsolver, I'm just trying to give a flavor for the book. That being said, it's stunning how she has created three distinct sets of characters and set the stories into motion. Loner Deanna might be most compelling and interesting (at least to this guy), but she seemed too feisty and difficult for somebody who has been communing gently with nature. I almost enjoyed the crotchety relationship between Garnett & Nannie more. Their scenes were funny, touching and bitingly real--two neighbors with sharply contrasting views of the world and how it's put together. Similarly, how Kingsolver peels back the friction between Cole and Lusa, and then shows Lusa's struggles to overcome an entrenched family (some of the members of Cole's extended family are extremely well drawn) is vivid and memorable.
Some of the other reviews complain about the heavy-handed message. It's not subtle. But you are in a whirlwind of intriguing characters, absorbing some terrific conversations, and amazed at the ability of a good writer to make characters leap from the page, fully realized. Just wish I could have removed the parts that made it feel like reading a science textbook.
Rated by buyers -
I picked this book up at a Starbucks trading table not expecting much.
From beginning to end I thoroughly enjoyed it. I really liked the alternating chapters covering different people who were all interesting and so well developed by the author character-wise. I loved them all and especially how the author cleverly intertwined their lives at the end.
This is a book I will read again.
Rated by buyers 
-
Prodigal Summer was a book picked by a friend of mine for our book club. We were all really excited as Kingsolver has a strong following and critics seem to love her. Needless to say from my review title I couldn't even finish it - I got to page 200 but with much effort. Her nature writing is nice (although probably boring and not for everyone) but her romance writing is really "cheesy" (think Harlequin romance) found in the section titled "Predators" - it was almost nauseating. "Moth love" was just depressing and the other section which I can't even remember the title of was, well, not very memorable... I was thinking maybe it was just me but several other members of our book club "hated it" and only 1 or 2 of the ladies even finished it. I didn't give the book 1 star b/c I admit that maybe I am missing something but this book just left me bored and wishing for more of a plot and better characters.
Rated by buyers -
I loved this book!Barbara Kinsolver has a way of making you feel connected to every living thing on Earth.Every time I read one of her books I have a larger appreciation for the Earth as a whole.
Find other books like this one:
