Prodigal Summer

Barbra Kingsolver’s Prodigal Summer creates a natural beat of unity through a wildness that celebrates the spirit of human nature. The essence of this story weaves together three stories within a changing web of life, found deep in the forested mountains and struggling small farms of southern Appalachia. At the heart of these intertwined narratives is genuine feeling of connectivity through nature. Deanna Wolfe, a wildlife biologist, watches the forest from her outpost in an isolated mountain cabin where she is caught off-guard by Eddie Bondo, a young hunter who comes to invade her most private spaces and make her realize that she can love something other than the fauna of the outside world. On a farm several miles down the mountain, another series of leaves unfold as Lusa Maluf Landowski, a bookish city girl turned farmer's wife, finds herself unexpectedly widowed in a strange place where she must choose between her old life or lose the land her late husband treasured. A few more miles down the road, a pair of elderly, feuding neighbors tend their respective farms and wrangle about God, pesticides, and the complexities of a world neither of them expected. Over the course of a single summer, discoveries are embedded inside countless intimate lessons of biology, the realities of small farming, and the final, urgent truth that humans are only one part of life on earth. The characters are knotted together by the complexities of life, love, religion, nature and relationships.
Barbara Kingsolver is a writer praised for her "extravagantly gifted narrative voice" and has written a total of twelve novels. Throughout the sixties Kingsolver grew up in the “alfalfa fields” of Kentucky and later graduated from DePauw University in Indiana. She originally majored in biology, but after taking one creative writing course she found her true love. Prodigal Summer was nominated for the 2002 International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award, which is only one of the many accredited awards Kingsolver has received for her writing. Kingsolver's fiction continues to be rich with the language of her native lands (Kentucky) and some of her other titles include The Poisonwood Bible, The Bean Trees, Animal Dreams and Pigs in Heaven.
The style of the novel allows the reader to gain perspectives from three different points of view. Initially, the characters seem to have no relation to each other, but as the book progresses their stories become more connected. Kingsolver’s “Kentucky accent” shines through, and the book reads like it’s straight off the farm. The story itself depicts the realities of life and skips the elegance in which some writers try to sugarcoat true meanings. Although the three stories interconnect well at the end, the beginning of the book seems to almost be like a “warm up” section for Kingsolver, who crams quite a bit of action into the last hundred pages.
Overall, Prodigal Summer was a solid read, however, it was not the most inspirational or life changing novel that I have ever read. I recommend it to those who love the natural aspect of life and enjoy reading about the fundamental relationship humans have with their environment. The book’s accurate descriptions of the outside world along with a central core for human nature provides for a distinct story. Prodigal Summer is like the intertwined web of life, depicting separate lives in relation to the bigger themes that connect us all.