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Loading... Prodigal Summerby Barbara Kingsolver
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Sign up for LibraryThing to find out whether you'll like this book. No current Talk conversations about this book. Victoria A great book about evolution. It follows the summer of three people-a 46 yr old female living alone as a National Forest employee who gets caught up with a 29 yr old; a 26 yr old woman whose spouse dies after a year of marriage and she must now run the family farm and a 80 yr old man trying to come up with a new variety of chestnut tree. It is about the effects of man to man and species to species in the world of survival. Listening to this was like a visit home. The interwoven stories are quite enjoyable in their own right. But it is Kingsolver's unerring touch with the language -- the rhythms and the idioms of the southern Blue Ridge -- that lift this book above a mere character study. The ecological lessons woven into the stories and dialog are icing on the cake. [Audiobook note: Kingsolver herself narrates the book. This, too, is a gift because an outsider can never quite get the southern Appalachian accent right.]
Readers hoping for the emotional intensity and wide-angle vision of ''The Poisonwood Bible,'' Kingsolver's magnificent 1998 epic about a self-destructing missionary family in the newly independent Congo, will most likely be disappointed. But the legions of fans primed on earlier books like ''Animal Dreams'' and ''The Bean Trees'' will find themselves back on familiar, well-cleared ground of plucky heroines, liberal politics and vivid descriptions of the natural world. In an improbably appealing book with the feeling of a nice stay inside a terrarium, Ms. Kingsolver means to illustrate the nature of biological destiny and provide enlightened discourse on various ecological matters. Is contained inHomeland and Other Stories | Animal Dreams | The Bean Trees | Pigs in Heaven | The Poisonwood Bible | Prodigal Summer by Barbara Kingsolver Has as a student's study guideDistinctionsNotable Lists
Barbara Kingsolver's fifth novel is a hymn to wildness that celebrates the prodigal spirit of human nature, and of nature itself. It weaves together three stories of human love within a larger tapestry of lives amid the mountains and farms of southern Appalachia. Over the course of one humid summer, this novel's intriguing protagonists face disparate predicaments but find connections to one another and to the flora and fauna with which they necessarily share a place. No library descriptions found. |
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Google Books — Loading... GenresMelvil Decimal System (DDC)813.54Literature English (North America) American fiction 20th Century 1945-1999LC ClassificationRatingAverage:
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