I really enjoyed this well written book, particularly the skill with which Kingsolver develops her characters and her wonderful wordplay. The idea of having three different scenarios loosely intertwined appealed and even though there wasn't a lot of action in the storyline I found it intriguing and hard to put down. However for me the end was a let down. I am looking forward to reading more of her books particularly "The Poisonwood Bible"

I was a little surprised by the numerous 5 star ratings of this book. It was well written and gave a beautiful image of the Appalachians but the truth is that nothing much happened in this novel. The strength of the story came from the development and growth of the characters, and Kingsolver did an excellent job of this, but I kept waiting through the whole book for the story to come together into something bigger or more complex and it never really did. I did enjoy getting to know the characters in the book but I felt let down by the story line. ( )

This is Kingsolver at her best. Enjoyed immensely. Really got a feel for the Appalachia's back east though have never been there. Love how she weaves history and her current plot so seamlessly. ( )

Beautiful language, a sensitivity not only to nature but humanity. Kingsolver is among my favorites now! ( )

Beautifully written, compassion for all creatures and perspectives. Plot development has integrity-- characters maintain their integrity thru whole novel.

Prodigal Summer is one of my favorite books, by one of my favorite authors. It tells the story of three different people over the course of one summer in Appalachia.

Deanna Wolfe, works for the Forest Service and lives an isolated existence tracking and protecting coyotes. Lusa Landowski is a young entomologist who moved to a small farm to be with her now deceased husband. Garnett Walker is an 80 year old man trying to bring back the chestnut trees to his region and battling with his neighbor Nannie, whose organic farming methods threaten his project.

Kingsolver deftly weaves these stories together with an appreciation and understanding of humans and their impact on the environment and nature. Kingsolver has a way of drawing you into the story and making you care about her characters.

I would put Kingsolver in the same class as Alice Hoffman in her ability to tell a story that makes you feel different, feel moved by reading one of her novels. I even got a biology lesson during this read, but I was so enthralled with the story that I didn't even notice I'd learned anything until it was all over :) Kingsolver writes beautiful and poetic prose but always has important themes within. This is a lighter read than The Poisonwood Bible. If you have never read one of her books, this is a good one to start with and I highly recommend it ( )

I was slow to get into this book Once I was hooked, I knew I would be satisfied with the way the characters stories were woven together. The descriptions of animals and the natural environment were beautifully crafted. ( )

An hour after I finished Prodigal Summer, I picked it up to read again. It is a beautiful example of the way a novel's structure can contribute to its whole; the threads that draw the disparate stories together as they progress perfectly mirror Kingsolver's vision of culture as a living organism. I loved this book more than I can say, and found myself cutting my reading time short each day, just so that I could live inside it longer. ( )

Prodigal Summer is a rather dense story from the mind of Barbra Kingsolver. It took a long time to see how the three interwoven stories would all fit together. While reading it, at various times I was not sure what I was reading. I almost felt as if this were a rambling collection of stories about ecology, wildlife preservation, families coping with crises and smart women making bad life choices.

If you start this book, stay with it. The payoff is worthwhile. Kingsolver is a great storyteller, she just needs to lay a lot of groundwork out before really getting into the main story. Make time for this book as it is a long read and it is one you won’t want to put down once you get into it. ( )

Just lovely. Three stories are followed. First, Deanna's love for nature overwhelms her tolerance for humanity, so she lives as a park warden on a mountainside, away from human contact. We learn what happens when her peace is disturbed as a young man stumbles upon her home. Next, we watch Lusa as she tries to figure out life as a new widow living far from home on her husband's family's farm. Finally, cantankerous old man Garnet Walker starts to confront the reasons he's always feuded with his next door neighbour.

The mountain, the plants, and the animals are just as much characters in this novel as Deanna, Lusa and Garnet. The language is poetic and the scenes set are beautiful and rich. Each of the stories kept me interested; I was disappointed at the end of each chapter as I had to leave those characters behind, but my disappointment soon faded as I was quickly caught up in the next story. Of course, all three stories or their characters are tied together at the end, but more loosely than you might expect.

If you liked The Poisonwood Bible, you'll like this one, too, and vice versa. Really enjoyable read, and I also learned a few things about ecology, too. ( )

Wonderfully crafted tale of three people at a crossroads. Each character is so genuine and unique, that once the book ended I found myself missing them. ( )

It was a pretty interesting and well written book with three different stories intertwining. My favorite was about the young widow Lusa and her relationship with her niece by marriage, Crystal. Second, I liked the story of Garnett and Nanny that went from hate to love (in a friendship way-and maybe more if the story went on. Lastly, I liked the story of Deanna and Eddie. ( )

I find it just amazing that I found so much solace in this book. My life is in turmoil and limbo, I don't personally relate to the situations that the characters are dealing with...but this book somehow made me feel better about my life and it's trials and nuances, but not in a comparative way. I think it was the overall mood of life continuing on no matter what obstacles, opportunities, and tribulations might arise. It was the overall mood of the book that calmed me. This is a great example of being sucked into a good book, living two lives and having one cross over into the other.

I'd never read a Barbara Kingsolver book before. I'm not sure why not. Oh, it probably had something to do with rebelling against the Oprah Book Club phenomenon and not falling in with the other lemmings that read "popular fiction". But if there's anything I've learned in the last few years, it's that sometimes people flock to books because they're just that damned good, and that I really shouldn't shun things/people/ideas without giving them a try first.

Bottom line: I'll say nothing about this book except that it is powerful, graceful, filled with love for nature and strength, and it is well worth reading. I expect I'll revisit this book again someday, something I don't usually do. ( )

I had really enjoyed all of Barbara Kingsolver's books that I'd read before, but this one has probably been my favorite of her fiction so far. I liked that it had separate narrators and intertwining stories like 'The Poisonwood Bible', but that the setting was more contemporary. I enjoyed the ecological tie-ins as well. ( )

AMazing descriptions of nature, love and loss. ( )

Barbara Kingsolver is a genius! Ecology is the backdrop to this story where seemingly separate lives come together. A forest ranger falls for a coyote hunter from Wyoming; an entomologist inherits a farm when her husband dies and raises goats to try to save it; a crabby old man learns a lesson about environmentalism from his organic, apple-growing neighbor. I didn't want it to end. ( )

too dull to finish ( )

Loved it! ( )

Prodigal Summer is a very rich book by a very gifted author. Her descriptions of the mountains and the farms make you see it all in front of you, and the characters are so real that you are there with them and almost feel with them. Poetic and sensual and deep, yes; but so achingly real and yet so simple.

I did find the environmental theme a bit laboured as we all got "the message" fairly early on and the repetition was a little unnecessary, but that was easy to forgive as it did fit with the story and the characters, and the whole package was such a joy to experience.

I was incredibly disappointed that Deanna and Lusa did not meet by the end of the book. I really do want to know how the interconnection of the characters that was building up actually works out. I would love to know what happens to the 3 younger ones; Crystal, Lowell and Rick. If there were to be a sequel I'd read it in a flash, but I suspect that she has achieved the main game (the message) and the wonderful people were the conduit for that. I hope I'm wrong.
Absolutely loved Nannie Rawley, and the interaction with Garnett. A great foil to the more intense sections involving Deanna and Lusa. Living on a small landholding myself (which is actually a chestnut orchard funnily enough) I could identify with some of the activities and the dilemmas of "country life". Lusa madly bottling all the fruit and tomatoes because she could not bear to see them go to waste, and dreaming up schemes to get rid of surplus cucumbers . . . that made me really chuckle.

And the last chapter I did find a little off putting with respect to the change of voice. Clever with the mirroring of the first, but once again unnecessary. But that's only a tiny gripe. ( )

Summary: Prodigal Summer is an interweaving of three storylines, all taking place during the course of one summer in and around Egg Fork, Tennessee. In the chapters entitled "Predators", Deanna Wolf, forest ranger and wildlife biologist lives alone in a small cabin in the National Forest, watching the changes wrought in the ecosystem by the return of a predator - the coyote. When she meets Eddie Bondo, a young rancher who hunts coyotes for sport, they are powerfully physically drawn together, despite the ideological differences that threaten to tear them apart. In "Moth Love", newly-married and newly-widowed city girl Lusa is left alone on her husband's family farm, surrounded by unfamiliar and hostile in-laws, and facing the prospect of carving out a place for herself in farming and in her new family. In "Old Chestnuts", Garnett Walker, a retired agriculture teacher whose pet project is the cultivation of a blight-resistant American Chestnut tree, butts heads with his free-spirited and utterly confounding neighbor, Nannie Rawley. Though initially seeming quite disparate, these three stories slowly reveal their connections, ultimately resulting in a vibrant tapestry rich with luna moths and magnolia warblers, coyotes and chestnut trees, life and death and humor and love and place and home and belonging.

Review: Prodigal Summer has been called Barbara Kingsolver's "sex book," both disparagingly and with affection. There certainly are a few "on-camera" sex scenes, although they're not written particularly graphically - Kingsolver herself has said while the themes of sex and fecundity are central to the novel, perhaps the most graphic sex scene is a dream sequence between a woman and a giant moth. However, to call it her "sex book" is to dismiss it too easily, and to overlook what I think is the point of the story. It's only about sex insomuch as everything in life is about sex - the struggle of each individual to pass on their genes, and leave something of themselves to the next generation. Calling it her "biology book" would be better (more on that in a minute), but the main theme of this book isn't sex, or biology - it's interconnection. This is most immediately apparent in the interlacing of the three storylines, which seem totally unrelated at first, but slowly yield up their connections, both major and minor, revealing the infinite number of tiny but not insubstantial ways that each of us touch the lives around us. But more than just personal interconnection, it also speaks to the connection of people to their environment, of the threads that bind us to the non-human lives around us - and of them to each other - resulting in a world that is a shining mass of sparkling threads of connection, where each life - moth, tree, or human - affects every other, and each life matters.

The ultimate result of this finely-drawn sense of connection is that Zebulon County emerges as a place with a sense of Place; essentially another character in its own right. I first read Prodigal Summer in the spring of 2002, long before I'd ever been to Appalachia, but Egg Fork and the surrounding mountains were more real to me than any place I'd encountered in a novel before. Now, six years and several summers of working in the southern Appalachian mountains later, I can say that Kingsolver absolutely gets it right. The forest, the small town, the farms, the people, the animals, the mountains - it's all there, vividly drawn, and pulsing with Life. Her characters are similarly real; by the end of the book you feel like you've known these people your whole life - not people like them, but them. Even with only a third as much space per story as in a traditional novel, Kingsolver still manages to draw complex, multi-layered, and lovably flawed people who feel as though you would recognize them walking down the street.

I will admit that I was predisposed to like this book - Kingsolver has a degree in biology (my own field), and was a science writer before becoming a full-time author. You can see the traces of this in all of her books, but nowhere is it brought to the fore like in Prodigal Summer. At the same time, the biology isn't blatant - it simultaneously motivates the stories without overshadowing them. Subtle points about ecology, evolution, and natural history are woven into the the overall framework, complementing and informing rather than detracting from the human drama.

I said that this is the book that made me love Kingsolver as a writer, but I'd like to do that one better. This is the book that makes me want to be a writer; this is the book I wish I could have written. I've read it enough times that I know some passages and bits of dialogue and turns of phrase by heart, but every time I read it, I'm left in awe of her powers of story construction and character development. Every time I read it, I'm left with a renewed sense of wonder in the the power of Life, and a renewed appreciation for what a miraculous, sacred place and community we are all a part of. 5 out of 5 stars.

Recommendation: Highly, highly recommended, obviously. ( )

I really have mixed feelings about this book. Taken individually I really enjoyed the stories of Deanna, Lusa, and Nannie Rawley. I also enjoyed how the three individual threads eventually wove into an inter-related tapestry at the end. However throughout the narrative I kept getting the feeling that this book was being used by the author as simply an ecological soapbox. All three women characters, at some point in their stories, fully used their opportunity to expound at length on the evils of pesticides, killing predators, and other questionable modern-day farming/ranching techniques. While I do agree with the message, I would have preferred to have that message derived from flow of the story instead of having it forced on the reader in a series of repetitive monologues. This also tended to give all three women characters a common voice which ultimately had the effect of blurring the uniqueness of each individual character and making them largely interchangeable. ( )

This was the second Barbara Kingsolver book I've read -- first work of fiction. You can be sure I will pick up more of her books. There are so many things that I loved about this book!!! But, I think the thing that I loved the most was the way Kingsolver left some of the story - especially some of the ending - to your imagination. This book will not get swapped out... I will definitely hang onto it so I can reread this gorgeous work and try to figure out why Kingsolver chose to focus on certain portions of stories more than others. Simply amazing! ( )

I really enjoyed the character's stories and the fact that they were tied together. ( )

I was embarassed to be seen with this novel. ( )

picked this book up a couple of times and put it right back down again. However, the third time I picked it up I stayed with it and I am glad I did. Richly written and somewhat lyrical in nature, Prodigal introduces us to interwoven story lines about love, nature and hope. Not a quick read but one to be savored. ( )