Prodigal Summer by Barbara Kingsolver
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
I loved this book. Because, coyotes.
This story is full of dichotomies – solitude and togetherness, birth and death, nature and nurture, male and female, sex and love, predator and prey, creation and evolution, God and science, macrocosm and microcosm. All of it weaves together, in the stories of a loner forest ranger with a hot summer fling, a newly widowed city girl alone on her farm, and a cantankerously righteous widower’s constant run-ins with his apple-growing, possibly-bra-burning Unitarian, probably-witchcraft-practicing, absolutely-not-to-be-borne neighbor. There is a lot of pollinating and ovulating going on here, plant and animal and human alike, and some tender love stories, and more trees and moths and birds and lynxes than I knew what to do with. Kingsolver’s writing is lush and lovely. I could feel the breeze and smell the humus of the forest floor and hear the singing of the coyotes as I read.
I’m shaving half a star off because, even though I’m a tree-hugging circle-of-lifer who agrees that our environment is a fragile thing that must be guarded rather than exploited, and who prefers companion planting to Roundup and GMO’s, by the umpteenth passage about the evils of chemical weed-killers I was feeling preached at and weary of it. I’m giving that half-star back for leaving me to wonder how that other green brocade chair ended up on Deanna’s porch. Some mysteries should remain mysteries.
And did I mention – coyotes!
This book was #5 on my 2017 reading challenge, a book with the name of a season in the title. I’ve discovered another writer I love, and can’t wait to read more of her books.
Bookshelves: current-social-issues, love-story-not-a-romance, literary-fiction, man-vs-nature, multiple-pov’s, reading- challenge, save-our-planet, social-commentary, this-is-all-the-romance-i-can-take, this-is-the-stuff-right-here, southern-writers, too-sexy-for-my-mom
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