The bright orange butterflies that show up to spend the winter on a failed Christmas tree farm up the mountain signal the beginning of a metamorphosis in Dellarobia's life.
"As habitually as a prayer, Dellarobia wished she were a different wife, for whom Cub's good heart outweighed his bad grammar."
Her 5-year-old gets the free lunch at school, and she worries about paying utility bills. Now, at 28, she's a stay-at-home mom with two preschoolers living in a small ranch house on a sheep farm owned by her in-laws. After a miscarriage, she worked as a waitress in the local diner. A shotgun wedding at age 17 to her high school sweetheart put paid to her dreams of college (she was the only member of her class to drive to Knoxville to take the ACT exam). The novel has been on The New York Times best-seller list for three weeks with its plot summarized in one meager sentence: "An Appalachian woman becomes involved in an effort to save monarch butterflies."ĭellarobia, despite her romantic name and flame-red hair, is an unlikely heroine. The big reveal comes when she returns to the mountain and puts on her eyeglasses. In the first chapter, Dellarobia Turnbow sets off on a desperate journey up the mountain behind her house to start an affair, but on the way, she experiences an inexplicable phenomenon ("trees turned to fire" and "a vision of glory") which sends her right back down to her family. Discussing the central environmental component of the book can diminish the effect of its suspenseful opening pages. Reviews of Kingsolver's seventh novel, "Flight Behavior," set in East Tennessee, should come with a spoiler alert. Her description of efforts to teach the young heirloom turkeys, products of generations of artificially inseminated birds, how to have old-fashioned sex is as LOL funny as any YouTube video. For an entire year, Kingsolver and her husband and children ate only locally grown or family-raised food. One of her nonfiction books, "Animal, Vegetable, Miracle" (2007), chronicles an experiment on the family farm in southwest Virginia, about 25 miles from Bristol. My favorite of her novels, "A Prodigal Summer" (2000), weaves together chestnut trees, coyotes and goats in Appalachia with a whole array of charmingly eccentric human characters in various stages of love. In several of her books, the mountains of Virginia and Tennessee provide settings that work well with the author's lyrical style and environmental message. Readers who are building a "green" library need to devote a shelf to Barbara Kingsolver.
0 kommentar(er)
