Type of bind: Paperback
Format: Bargain Price
Quantity: 1
Page Count: 464
Printing Date: October 01, 2001
Sale Popularity Level: 276131
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Product Description:
Triumphing once again, Barbara Kingsolver has written a beautiful new 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 in 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 them from 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 her solitary life. Down the mountain, another web of lives unfolds as Lusa Maluf Landowski, a bookish city girl turned farmer's wife, finds herself 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 the future holds.
Over the course of one long summer, these characters find connections to one another, and to the land, and the final, urgent truth that humans are only one piece of life on earth.
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Amazon.com:
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 
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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.
Rated by buyers 
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I just finished this book, and I learned so much. I am in the process of planting my garden, and will definitely do things differently because I read this book. It is a wonderful fictional read that sneaks in several valuable lessons about ecology and nature. I loved the characters and I wish they were my friends.
Rated by buyers -
I absolutely loved this book. Fiction is a matter of taste, I know, but I honestly wonder how anyone could dislike this book.
Every time I read it, I discover something new within it.
If you read it aloud to your spouse before going to sleep, I won't guarantee it, but I'll bet you get lucky.
In Prodigal Summer, Kingsolver shows the world how craft a beautiful sentence, not just once but a thousand times.
Finally, while I'm convinced that I live in one of the world's most beautiful places, every time I read this book, I want to move to Kentucky. How's that for evocative?
Rated by buyers 
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Evocative nature writing, a sensory picture of Appalachia. The "prodigal" in the title seems to refer to the profuse and lavish display of procreation in the plant and animal world during one spring and summer. There are many connected stories, but the focus is on three: a forest ranger protecting a mountain and it's newly arrived coyotes and her affair with a hunter; a young wife from the city trying to fit in to a farmer's way of life and his clannish family; and two comically feuding elderly neighbors--a freespirited organic apple farmer and a lonely widower set in his ways, determined to poison every nuisance. The book's about balance in the natural world, a healthy ecosystem and every living thing's place in it. Kingsolver can be very heavy-handed in hammering this message home.
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