Synopsis
Set in Appalachia, Kingsolver's very pastoral novel tells the stories of three women who live close to the land. A wildlife biologist studying coyotes is fascinated by a young man with a passion for hunting. An intellectually inclined farmer's wife finds she must stand up for what she believes in. And two elderly country people battle about everything from religion to pesticides, and make startling changes in their lives.
| Details | | Publication Date: | 2000-10-01 |
| Size | | Length: | 444 pages | | Height: | 9.3 in | | Width: | 6.5 in | | Thickness: | 1.5 in | | Weight: | 28.0 oz |
Publisher's Note
Barbara Kingsolver, a writer praised for her "extravagantly gifted narrative voice" (New York Times Book Review), has created with this novel a hymn to wildness that celebrates the prodigal spirit of human nature, and of nature itself. Prodigal Summer weaves together three stories of human love within a larger tapestry of lives inhabiting the forested mountains and struggling small farms of southern Appalachia. At the heart of these intertwined narratives is a den of coyotes that have recently migrated into the region. Deanna Wolfe, a reclusive 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 confound her self-assured, solitary life. On a farm several miles down the mountain, another web of lives unfolds as Lusa Maluf Landowski, a bookish city girl turned farmer's wife, finds herself unexpectedly marooned in a strange place where she must declare or lose her attachment to the land. And 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 one humid summer, as the urge to procreate overtakes a green and profligate countryside, these characters find connections to one another and to the flora and fauna with which they necessarily share a place. Their 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. With the richness that characterizes Barbara Kingsolver's finest work, Prodigal Summer embraces pure thematic originality and demonstrates a balance of narrative and ideas that only an accomplished novelist could render so beautifully.
Industry Reviews
"[A] vibrant new novel....[A]n improbably appealing book with the feeling of a nice stay inside a terrarium."
New York Times - Janet Maslin (11/02/2000)
"Readers hoping for the emotional intensity and wide-angle vision of THE POISONWOOD BIBLE...will most likely be disappointed....Kingsolver is an ambitious writer, but here she has bitten off a lot that she doesn't really chew. A richer book might've given life to the hunter's worldview and Bible Belt ignorance rather than setting them up like bowling pins to be knocked down....PRODIGAL SUMMER has its plot twists, few of them surprising....In the end the expendable males have disappeared, and the women and children band together in their own blended families, like the coyotes....This may be an attractive fable, but it doesn't make for the kind of psychologically complex literature Kingsolver is well capable of."
New York Times Book Review - Jennifer Schuessler (11/05/2000)
"Kingsolver is an able realist writer, whose delicately wrought plots are characteristically improbable and satisfying....PRODIGAL SUMMER is the least satisfying of Kingsolver's novels....[T]he tendentious ecological diatribes with which each woman tries to educate her chosen mate become highly tedious here."
Times Literary Supplement - Juliet Fleming (12/01/2000)
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