Prodigal Summer: A Novel Paperback – October 16, 2001

I thoroughly enjoyed this book about farm life in the Appalachia. The stories start out as separate pieces, but then eventually start to intertwine just a little. There are a lot of other reviews that have done a great job summarizing the book so I am just going to leave some thoughts.I didn’t buy the Deanna and Eddie Bondo romance. The parts where she was having deep discussions with him about the importance of coyotes or when she was wondering the woods herself were so beautiful and detailed that I just loved getting lost in the book. However, I had a hard time believing that she would even want to be intimate with someone so against her personal beliefs. It did not make Eddie at all a very appealing person to me and it made me wonder how she could stand him being around. He was almost an intruder in my opinion and the story may have been more intriguing if he were.After Cole died, Lusa looks into putting together a goat herd to sell the meat to her family in New York City. I loved that Kingsolver had this character do something original. After having a long conversation about it with Little Rickie, you would think that she would need his help getting the goats. Instead, Kingsolver skipped over this and she just went and got the goats herself and it all seemed pretty seamless. It would have been interesting to hear more about the new challenges of raising goats; especially being an inexperienced farmer. I would have loved for Rickie to be 18 or 19 and Kingsolver blossoming that romance a little more.The introspective discussion after Eddie killed a turkey left me wishing I was there to say a few things. On page 325, Eddie kills a turkey in the woods. Deanna writes it off saying that it was a male and probably was old or sick enough that it would have made a meal for a bobcat or other predator on the mountain. Eddie teases her surprised she is not a vegetarian for all her talk about caring for the animals on the mountain. She says the concept of vegetarianism is not so simple, because to farm wheat a lot of animals get killed by the machinery. I know this is Kingsolver’s opinion being inserted here, but vegetarianism and veganism is not about purity, it’s about doing the least amount of harm in this world as possible. Much of the grains that are grown are to feed animals that are raised for meat. Less meat, less wheat, less mice and rabbits that are killed and probably more forests don’t need to be cut down. Also, earlier Deanna talks about cats being unnatural predators. I agree with this; however, in this discussion about the turkey, how are humans not also considered unnatural predators? Wasn’t she denying the bobcat or coyote a meal?The meditations on ecology, wildlife preservation, forests, and organic farming made me believe this was a better environmental novel than Overstory. I read Overstory and even though that book started out pretty good, it petered out for me as if the author got bored with the story and the characters. This book held my attention the entire time as if Kingsolver was in love with the story and all the details. This book deserved an award.Last, an epilogue would have been nice. I did not really like the last chapter of the book. I didn’t understand it. I would have loved instead for there to be an epilogue on what happens to these characters after ten years. If I could write it, Deanna and her daughter inherit Nannie Rawley’s farm and she continues to grow organic produce. Garnett’s grandchildren continue with the Chestnut farm and they achieve the beginnings of a grove that is free of Chestnut blight. Lusa and Rickie after a few years eventually do marry and start a family continuing the Widener name on the ancestral farm. I think the stories were all going in this direction, but it would have been nice to see the narratives through to the end.

Reflective of the author's biology background, this novel is a paean to nature: its rawness, mystery, fecundity, delicate balance, etc. Set in rural Appalachia, the author is determined to make her ecological points through the interleaved stories of three resilient women: Deanna Wolfe, 47, a ranger living in isolation on a mountain, Lusa Widener, 28, newly widowed and living on a tobacco farm, and Nannie Rawley, 75, the operator of an organic apple orchard. All of these women, whether through academic training or experience, are opposed to any actions that upset nature's ecological balance, such as the indiscriminate killing of predators or the use of pesticides. An essential part of their lives is their resistance to or education of those, especially men, who actively or inadvertently do harm to the eco-system.The author hardly shrinks from the necessitous sexual, reproductive elements of nature; her characters do not escape its pull. The normally wary Deanna, especially when it comes to protecting a fledgling coyote family, is breathlessly overwhelmed by the rugged, 28 year old Eddie Bondo, an itinerant hunter, who simply appears one day on her mountain. Lusa, the despised widow of the favored youngest son of a family of Appalachian rednecks, finds her sexual awareness awakened by the raw attraction of a teen-age nephew.The relentless cycles of birth, growth, decay, and death across seasons and years is well presented by lyrical descriptions and discussions of the life phases of moths, beetles, coyotes, plants, herbivores, carnivores, etc. The characters seem at times to be more mouthpieces for the author's environmental agenda, than fully fleshed out. The men are for the most part set pieces. As it turns out, the characters are connected. However, the tribulations of Lusa in recovering from the death of her husband constitutes the main plot thread. Over all, this book has a certain sensuality and is not without its educative aspects, but is not a particularly riveting story.