Flight Behavior by Barbara Kingsolver
I know I have mentioned my love affair with BK before, but it deserves another little nod here. Her latest, Flight Behavior was a good read. I'll just paste the goodreads description, then give my two cents:
Flight Behavior transfixes from its opening scene, when a young woman's narrow experience of life is thrown wide with the force of a raging fire. In the lyrical language of her native Appalachia, Barbara Kingsolver bares the rich, tarnished humanity of her novel's inhabitants and unearths the modern complexities of rural existence. Characters and reader alike are quickly carried beyond familiar territory here, into the unsettled ground of science, faith, and everyday truces between reason and conviction.
Dellarobia Turnbow is a restless farm wife who gave up her own plans when she accidentally became pregnant at seventeen. Now, after a decade of domestic disharmony on a failing farm, she has settled for permanent disappointment but seeks momentary escape through an obsessive flirtation with a younger man. As she hikes up a mountain road behind her house to a secret tryst, she encounters a shocking sight: a silent, forested valley filled with what looks like a lake of fire. She can only understand it as a cautionary miracle, but it sparks a raft of other explanations from scientists, religious leaders, and the media. The bewildering emergency draws rural farmers into unexpected acquaintance with urbane journalists, opportunists, sightseers, and a striking biologist with his own stake in the outcome. As the community lines up to judge the woman and her miracle, Dellarobia confronts her family, her church, her town, and a larger world, in a flight toward truth that could undo all she has ever believed.
Flight Behavior takes on one of the most contentious subjects of our time: climate change. With a deft and versatile empathy Kingsolver dissects the motives that drive denial and belief in a precarious world.
Dellarobia Turnbow is a restless farm wife who gave up her own plans when she accidentally became pregnant at seventeen. Now, after a decade of domestic disharmony on a failing farm, she has settled for permanent disappointment but seeks momentary escape through an obsessive flirtation with a younger man. As she hikes up a mountain road behind her house to a secret tryst, she encounters a shocking sight: a silent, forested valley filled with what looks like a lake of fire. She can only understand it as a cautionary miracle, but it sparks a raft of other explanations from scientists, religious leaders, and the media. The bewildering emergency draws rural farmers into unexpected acquaintance with urbane journalists, opportunists, sightseers, and a striking biologist with his own stake in the outcome. As the community lines up to judge the woman and her miracle, Dellarobia confronts her family, her church, her town, and a larger world, in a flight toward truth that could undo all she has ever believed.
Flight Behavior takes on one of the most contentious subjects of our time: climate change. With a deft and versatile empathy Kingsolver dissects the motives that drive denial and belief in a precarious world.
O.K. so I prefer more of the relationship/inner struggle that the main character, Dellarobia, was going through (reminded me of Kaye Gibbons...I love allll her books, she knows how to give women a VOICE). Not so much the science stuff (but it was still interesting) that reminded me of State of Wonder by Ann Patchett, which I really liked too. Flight Behavior was more than just a commentary on global warming. Sometimes the characters got a little long-winded, and some of it was a little cliche, but it's worth reading.
If you've read any Barbara Kingsolver (I know some of you have) I would rank this about on par with The Bean Trees. It was WAY better than Prodigal Summer and The Lacuna but nowhere as good as The Poisonwood Bible, which was just on another level completely. I liked reading fiction from her that was along the same lines as her more personal non-fiction: Animal, Vegetable, Miracle. Since this book was about farmers in the Appalachia's, and in Animal, Vegetable, Miracle Barbara and her family are trying to be farmers in the Appalachia's.
Anyway, on to the next! Hooray for books that make you want to keep on reading, and not give up and watch television.
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