Prodigal Summer: A Novel

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

Product Description:
Barbara Kingsolver's fifth novel is a hymn to wildness that celebrates the prodigal spirit of human nature, and of nature itself. It weaves together three stories of human love within a larger tapestry of lives amid the mountains and farms of southern Appalachia. Over the course of one humid summer, this novel's intriguing protagonists face disparate predicaments but find connections to one another and to the flora and fauna with which they necessarily share a place.

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Customer Reviews

Rating: - The Mystery and Beauty of Life
Barbara Kingsolver is undoubtedly one of the most gifted contemporary novelists. I have thoroughly enjoyed each of her books that I have read. What I loved about this book was how she dealt with the relationship between people and nature. She uses marvelous word pictures to describe the very essence of nature.

I also loved her character development and the relationships they had with each other. She paints very human characters with a touch of sentimentality and endearing humor. Beneath ... Read More
Rating: - Tapestry of Nature
I found this novel to be a totally engaging relating of the story of the inhabitants-animal, vegetable, and human- during one season on a Southern mountainous region .The explanations and descriptions of the interwoven connections between all creatures,and Kingsolver's obvious deeply felt engagement with the natural world, were edifying and entertaining, coming across easily with the author's usual wit.In particular, I enjoyed the parallels between human interactions and the connections between ... Read More
Rating: - Review Prodigal Summer
I had ordered this same product from Ebay and never received it.This was a book club read so I was very glad when I received it in a short time.Thanks Amazon
Rating: - Didn't engage me
I got about halfway through this novel before I gave up on it. While I appreciate the setting (the mountains of North Carolina) and the themes (what is man's relationship to nature? how do we steward the earth while looking after our own needs?), I could not relate to any of the characters, and I disliked the dynamic of male vs. female, destroyer vs. nurturer that was being set up. I definitely didn't find this novel as engaging as either The Poisonwood Bible or Animal, Vegetable, Miracle.
Rating: - Prodigal Summer
This Barbara Kingsolver fiction work was masterfully researched and wound into a tale of a truly "prodigal" summer set in the mountains of Appalachia.She used her own background in biology, animal science and botany to bring the reader into a very believable interaction with a unique cast of characters,their surroundings and their passions.Kingsolver comes through with flying colors in her ability to weave a well-crafted, multi-pronged story which holds the reader's attention to the final page. ... Read More