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macloo 's review for:
Prodigal Summer
by Barbara Kingsolver
It turns out I have read most of Kingsolver's novels, starting back in the 1990s, but somehow I had missed this one. It's excellent. There are two things I particularly like about her stories: Her characters have a lot of interesting thoughts and make sometimes startling associations in their minds. In the course of the story, each of the main characters grows a lot.
Nature and the natural balance of plants and animals (and insects!) play a big role in this book. One character is up on a mountain, in the forest. Three others live at the base of the mountain, where most people make a living from farming. (If you don't know anything about life on a small family farm, you'll learn some new things here.) All these people are very different from me, but I enjoyed spending time with them and absorbing their lives and their routines. I really liked the process of Lusa (not a farmer) slowly finding out how to fit in with her husband's farming family. She has made a lot of assumptions about what they think about her, and slowly she comes to see that on many counts, she was mistaken.
It's a good story. By moving among the three storylines (Deanna, Lusa, and Garnett), Kingsolver binds us to the land and the processes of growth and decline. I liked the pacing and the ending, even though it does not neatly wrap up all these lives. The people and the mountain will go on living after we leave them.
Nature and the natural balance of plants and animals (and insects!) play a big role in this book. One character is up on a mountain, in the forest. Three others live at the base of the mountain, where most people make a living from farming. (If you don't know anything about life on a small family farm, you'll learn some new things here.) All these people are very different from me, but I enjoyed spending time with them and absorbing their lives and their routines. I really liked the process of Lusa (not a farmer) slowly finding out how to fit in with her husband's farming family. She has made a lot of assumptions about what they think about her, and slowly she comes to see that on many counts, she was mistaken.
It's a good story. By moving among the three storylines (Deanna, Lusa, and Garnett), Kingsolver binds us to the land and the processes of growth and decline. I liked the pacing and the ending, even though it does not neatly wrap up all these lives. The people and the mountain will go on living after we leave them.