Book completed
Mar. 24th, 2024 03:19 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
eve_primeFlight Behavior, by Barbara Kingsolver. What a great book! It begins with our point-of-view character, Dellarobia Turnbow, hiking up the mountain behind the Tennessee property where she lives with her dull-witted but kind husband and their two small children – and on the other side of the property, her parents-in-law. Dellarobia needs something more from life. At this point she’s prepared to throw away everything she has for a tryst with a hot young guy she’s met, and as her thoughts go on and on, we readers hope she’ll really rethink that, although what she’d be throwing away may not really be that great. (And I was astonished that I was so quickly hooked on the interior monologue of a woman from her background about to do something rash and silly.)
As she approaches the place they’ve planned to meet, though, Dellarobia comes across something extraordinary – is the forested valley she sees on fire? But no, there’s no sound, no smoke. And she’s not wearing her glasses because she wanted to look good for her prospective lover. She stands there astonished, then turns and goes back down the mountain – but her life has changed forever.
I don’t want to give away too much, but the book is about climate change. The world may be falling apart. And yet it’s a work of hope, on the individual level, because as we readers have figured out, Dellarobia’s problem is that her world is just much too small for her. She’s smart, very smart. And because Kingsolver is herself from Appalachia, she knows that Dellarobia’s answers should involve broadening the world she knows, not simply leaving it behind.
The sense of place is fantastic, the community is wonderful. We meet unusual and interesting people. We avoid clichés – the local minister is kind and insightful, not fire-and-brimstone; the dreadful mother-in-law has hidden depths. The conversations Dellarobia has with her precocious son and her exasperating mother-in-law are especially wonderful, as is the shopping trip to the dollar store in the next town over. The insights into people’s resistance to new information and tendency to parrot whatever their “clan” thinks are solid. The ending is excellent. Highly recommended.
As she approaches the place they’ve planned to meet, though, Dellarobia comes across something extraordinary – is the forested valley she sees on fire? But no, there’s no sound, no smoke. And she’s not wearing her glasses because she wanted to look good for her prospective lover. She stands there astonished, then turns and goes back down the mountain – but her life has changed forever.
I don’t want to give away too much, but the book is about climate change. The world may be falling apart. And yet it’s a work of hope, on the individual level, because as we readers have figured out, Dellarobia’s problem is that her world is just much too small for her. She’s smart, very smart. And because Kingsolver is herself from Appalachia, she knows that Dellarobia’s answers should involve broadening the world she knows, not simply leaving it behind.
The sense of place is fantastic, the community is wonderful. We meet unusual and interesting people. We avoid clichés – the local minister is kind and insightful, not fire-and-brimstone; the dreadful mother-in-law has hidden depths. The conversations Dellarobia has with her precocious son and her exasperating mother-in-law are especially wonderful, as is the shopping trip to the dollar store in the next town over. The insights into people’s resistance to new information and tendency to parrot whatever their “clan” thinks are solid. The ending is excellent. Highly recommended.
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Date: 2024-03-24 11:13 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2024-03-25 05:05 am (UTC)