Flight Behavior: A Novel (edition 2012)

I am a Kingsolver fan and once again her writing is beautiful, and some of the sentences describing Dellarobbia and her life are very quotable - a whole story in just one line. However, I did find it a bit preachy-perhaps as one of the converted (global warming, not religion!!) I felt I didn't need all the warnings in my face. Perhaps, for those who are still in denial, it will be a wake up call, so I'm not trashing the theme - it just went on a bit too long. The characters are drawn with empathy and the humaness of them all is so identifable. The harshness of life in that environment, and the choices available, or lack thereof, of the people living there, are clearly represented. ( )

Flight Behavior is both a narrative about Dellarobbia Turnbow and an essay about climate change. While author Barbara Kingsolver skillfully interweaves the narrative and the essay, the book is much more a story about how the monarch butterflies affect everyday human lives than it is a discussion about the serious effects of climate change.

Dellarobbia Turbow lives in Featherstone, Tennessee in the heart of the Appalachian Mountains with her husband Cub and their two children Preston 6 and Cordelia 2. She had planned on going to college, but her "flight plan" had been changed by a pregnancy and an early marriage to Cub; at age 28, she has been married for 11 years and is a stay-at-home mom living in a house built on property owned by her in-laws, Bear and Hester. She feels unchallenged and unfulfilled.

One day, having decided to run away from it all with a handsome younger "telephone guy, Dellarobbia takes High Road (irony) to meet him in an old cabin up the mountain. She encounters millions and millions of monarch butterflies in the trees on her path, and her life (and many other lives) is changed forever.

Will the butterflies survive the conditions here? Will Dellarobbia and her children survive and thrive in their environment?
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I read quite a few of Kingsolver's books. This one was a little slow in the beginning as the characters took many pages to develop. As the people filled out, so did my interest. About half way through I was hooked.

I could have used a little less of the lecture. I appreciated the views of 350.org but it was hard to include them without sounding "teachy". But I sincerely hope this got the message out to those unfamiliar with the facts of global climate change.

For most avid readers and fans of Kingsolver, the enironmental views were like preaching to the choir. For a new reader, this would not be true.

I hope book clubs read this like crazy! There was much to discuss and some of it was social commentary. I live in upstate NY and can relate to the struggle of everyday people and farmers that might be considering fracking or mining their properties. There are many parallels with what is happening in this book with what is happening in this rural area. Kingsolver ties in the local with the global very well. ( )

“The forest blazed with its own internal flame. 'Jesus,' she said, not calling for help, she and Jesus weren’t that close, but putting her voice in the world because nothing else present made sense … The flame now appeared to lift from individual treetops in showers of orange sparks, exploding the way a pine log does in a campfire when it’s poked. A forest fire, if that’s what it was, would roar. This consternation swept the mountain in perfect silence." (Ch 1)

Flight Behavior is set in the Appalachian Mountains of Tennessee where Dellrobia Turnbow, a teenage bride come rural farm wife, discovers a spectacular migration of Monarch butterflies. Unfortunately, it is global warming, a “sickness of nature,” which has caused the Monarchs to deviate to Tennessee from their usual winter home in Mexico. The Turnbow farm is soon home to world-class scientists studying the phenomenon of the Monarchs. Dellarobia finds herself immersed in a world of knowledge, information, and learning, associating with persons well-educated and well-travelled. The experience prompts her to reflect on the “bleak helplessness” with which she views her life’s circumstances. While she loves both husband and children, her simple farm life is a far cry from the college education and professional career she aspired to. Intensely unhappy, she has gone so far as to exhibit “flight behaviour” of her own, but none of her forays have amounted to more than undignified obsessions. Now the Monarchs have opened a new world to her. As their very existence is endangered by the threat of cold in the Appalachians, Dellarobia is jarred out of herself and into the enormity of new opportunity. Will it be the impetus for positive change?

”Unearthly beauty had appeared to her, a vision of glory to stop her in the road. For her alone these orange boughs lifted, these long shadows became a brightness rising. It looked like the inside of joy, if a person could see that. A valley of lights, an ethereal wind. It had to mean something.” (Ch 1)

Kingsolver is an excellent writer and a fine storyteller. Her characters here are masterfully developed as is her sense of small, rural Tennessee. Certainly Flight Behavior is ambitious, touching on, as it does, global warming, education, media bias, poverty, and relationships. Recommended. ( )

interesting character and masterful description of setting, but a bit too preachy. ( )