Prodigal Summer

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Solitude is a human presumption. Every quiet step is thunder to beetle life underfoot, a tug of impalpable thread on the web pulling mate to mate and predator to prey, a beginning or an end. Every choice is a world made new for the chosen." Over the course of one humid summer, as the urge to procreate overtakes a green and profligate countryside, these characters find connections to one another and to the flora and fauna with which they necessarily share a place. Their discoveries are embedded inside countless intimate lessons of biology, the realities of small farming, and the final, urgent truth that humans are only one part of life on earth.

As an example of the plot, in the first chapter the story begins in introducing the reader to not only a main character, but also to Nature in the randiness of spring as seen through the human umwelt. It's a thread exploited further as the story progresses, spiked with joy, enmity, loss, and irony. What better way to grab the reader's interest than with hormonal enticement, the subjective issues it engenders, and accompanying pleasures and resentments. In my experience, that's the cornerstone of much of literature. I'm not complaining mind you, I'm for whatever might work to hopefully instill a better understanding of the natural world that sustains us — that for the sake of our futures.

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it nearly did. it wasn't bad. i infact enjoyed it more and more as the LONG ASS story went on and on. very little plot. nothing really happening. lots of boring ass inane descriptions of nature that got really old really fast. her previously used narrative device of telling different stories with different narrators each chapter was annoying here. i found i only cared about 1 person's story, and didnt care about any of the other co-protagonists. But. . . even though the protagonists in Prodigal Summer are also unrelatable to me, (lady scientists who think hair brushes are tools for collecting strands of DNA). . . this is the book that FINALLY worked for me. NK: The goal is definitely this summer. But the summer passes swiftly so any time between June and August to be in production would be the dream and the goal, to get it made this year.

Despite my resistance to some features of the worldview presented here, I’m still on board with Kingsolver’s general goal, which is to stubbornly contextualize human activities and aspirations within the diverse dance of earthly life and the greater cosmos that contains it. Humility is called for, early and often. Death is nearby, and not worth lamenting more than is necessary to confront and process our grief. Birth and rebirth are always imminent. I’ll let her have the last word: I was far more interested in Lusa's story than the other two - although my interest in Deanna's was high at the start, then faded & Garnett's story was (finally) interesting at the finish. I'm a bit of a tree hugging, muesli munching, bone carving wearing greenie myself,* but found this book got more than a little "preachy" as it went on. For example; Very descriptive and calming. Three stories tied into one, and cleaned up neatly at the end. A good summertime read. I enjoyed Kingsolver's Poisonwood Bible so much that for some reason I delayed reading this one (does that make sense?). I just liked the idea of another unread novel by her being out there, waiting for me to read -- something I was saving like a piece of rich dark chocolate. Kingsolver is an ambitious writer, but here she has bitten off a lot that she doesn't really chew. A richer book might've given life to the hunter's worldview and Bible Belt ignorance rather than setting them up like bowling pins to be

I thought the story even handed and the ending a nice touch. I also thought the story well crafted in knowing what to leave out.

Lusa is an entomologist and a widower living in Egg Fork. Her husband, Cole Widener just died. She is distraught by his death and the only thing she can hold on to is the epic love that they shared. Lusa constantly smells the clothes of her dead husband to feel close to him. Since she is from the city, she finds farm life exhausting and tries to evade those responsibilities despite her husband’s family advising her otherwise. Eddie Bondo The second main character mentioned is Lusa, and her chapters are titled "Moth Love." She is an entomologist from Lexington who is lonely in her new home and marriage. She and her husband frequently argue, and she feels like an outsider in his family's home and the community. Soon into her story, Cole is killed in an automobile accident, and she spends the rest of the book dealing with his death, becoming part of his family, and finding her place in this small community in Zebulon County. Cole's life becomes a string of stories to learn more about his life, as well as the history of his entire family. She has become part of this family, when she and the family let their guards down and get to know each other. Also, she falls in love with her dying sister-in-law's children and prepares to adopt them. This adoption gives her a place in this family, and it keeps the family home in the Widener family for another generation. It ain't what you don't know that gets you into trouble. It's what you know for sure that just ain't so." ~ Mark TwainDown the road, the complications of courtship continue. Garnett Walker, a crotchety septuagenarian who dreams of reviving the extinct American chestnut, can't stop thinking about his neighbor Nannie Rawley. Partly he's enraged by her refusal So, my first 4 attempts to read Barbara Kingsolver were rough. I kept reading her books and kept feeling disappointed by, well, my reaction of really disliking them. How could I not admire a woman who would dedicate a book to “wildness, where it lives?” How could I not love a writer who has spent her impressive career drawing attention to the damage we are doing to our planet? The key themes of the book are ecological/natural: that Spring/Summer are times of active reproduction and are sexually charged in nature; that removing a predator from an ecological system has huge repercussions, often causing the next layer down to devastate the ecology; that indeterminate pesticides often have the effect of boosting the population of the herbivore insects they seek to control (because of their proportionately effect on their carnivore predators); that man is also a natural creature but has largely forgotten or obscured the basic effects of pheromones or of lunar inspired cycles; the importance of re-wilding.

Another pause. She watched his hands, but what pulled on her was the dark green glint of his eyes. He observed her acutely, seeming to evaluate her hill-inflected vowels for the secrets behind her “yep” and “nope.” His grin turned down on the corners instead of up, asking a curved parenthetical question above his right-angled chin. She could not remember a more compelling combination of features on any man she’d ever seen. Along the same lines, the interweaving of characters and narrative voices is great, but about 3/4 of the way through the book every main character had been connected to every other main character in a way that simply felt over the top and a bit trite. Like, we get it, it's a small community and these characters needed to have some kind of theme tying them together, but it got a bit silly by the final connection. This is a noteworthy book that exemplifies accomplished writing, interleaving the natural world with the more immediate human bubble, depicting conflicting proclivities through contrasting characters, even contradictions in individual thinking. Also in showing how alike all life forms are, differing for the most part only morphologically in niche adaptation with varying subjective perspectives.

NK: Really it’s budgetary. It is hard to find financing to support a female-driven drama. Those are dirty words in our industry these days, sadly. Then, trying to do it at as low a number as possible because that’s just what the business demands. There are a lot of exciting challenges in dealing with the nature and wild life in the film and how to depict the transition from early summer to late summer within a short shooting schedule. Those are the fun challenges lying ahead. Eddie Bondo and Deanna Wolfe share a love of nature, and they begin their interlude as lovers before he even knows her name. Deanna is a Forest Service employee serving as a resident biologist-ranger overseeing a section of the Zebulon National Forest. She has a deep knowledge of the people and ecology of Zebulon Valley and a stake in the wildlife balance, which she suspects that Eddie will threaten. This is a book to be savored, meaning, it is not a light easy read, and it isn't fluff. It isn't loaded with heavy issues (Barbara Kingsolver's "Poisonwood Bible" is definitely a heavier chunk o' reading compared to this) but I feel to truly appreciate "Prodigal Summer", one must be in the right mindset.