A review by rustyray
Prodigal Summer by Barbara Kingsolver

emotional reflective slow-paced

• Plot- or character-driven? Character
• Strong character development? Yes
• Loveable characters? Yes
• Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.5

Excellent, follows the stories of three outdoorsy women in rural Appalachia. One kinda second person POV from an senile neighbor while the others we follow directly. Our main ladies are at different stages of acceptance of feminity in biology and society. All characters very well written and I could hear their voices and feel the judgements. Nicely interwoven natural history. Some scenes got very slow, especially if we were in the character's head for pages on end. 

Quotes 

Or it was possible she was witnessing the fatal, final disorientation that overcomes a creature as it reaches the end of its life. Once as a child.... she'd found a Luna moth in that condition: confused and dying on the pavement in front of their truck. Up close,  it was a frightening beast rithing and beating against her hand until whiffs of pale green fur slipped off its body and stuck to her fingers. Her horror made her want to throw it down, and and only her previous conceived affection for the luna that made her hold on... It glared at [her] seeming to know too much for an insect and, worse, seeming disdainful. She hadn't give up her love for luna after that, but she'd never forgotten, either, how a mystery caught in the hand could lose its grace.

She breathes deeply and tried not to hate this snake. Doing his job, was all. Living out his life like the thousand other copperheads on this mountain that would never be seen by human eyes; they wanted only their one or two rodents a month, the living wage, a contribution to the balance. Not one of them wanted to be stepped on or, heaven forbid, to have to sink its fangs into a monstrous, inedible mammal a hundred times its size- a waste of expensive toxin at best. She knew all of this. You can stare at a thing and know that you personally have no place in its heart whatsoever, but keeping it out of yours is another matter.

What did she want him to do? That was the question. When a body wanted one thing wholly and a mind wanted the opposite, which of the two was she? ...it didn't matter what she chose. The world was what it was, a place with its own rules of hunger and satisfaction. Creatures lived and mated and died, they came and went, as surely as summer did. They would go their own ways, of their own accord.