MostlyFiction Book Reviews » Barbara Kingsolver We Love to Read! Wed, 14 May 2014 13:06:32 +0000 en-US hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=4.3 FLIGHT BEHAVIOR by Barbara Kingsolver /2013/flight-behavior-by-barbara-kingsolver/ /2013/flight-behavior-by-barbara-kingsolver/#comments Sat, 14 Dec 2013 18:59:02 +0000 /?p=23635 Book Quote:

“On shearing day the weather turned cool and fine. On the strength of that and nothing more, just a few degrees of temperature, the gray clouds scurried away to parts unknown like a fleet of barn cats. The chore of turning ninety ewes and their uncountable half-grown lambs through the shearing stall became a day’s good work instead of the misery expected by all. As far as Dellarobia could remember, no autumn shearing had been so pleasant.”

Book Review:

Review by Jill I. Shtulman  (DEC 14, 2013)

Barbara Kingsolver is one of those rare writers with whom you know what you are getting before you open the first page.

You know, for example, that the prose is going to be literary, dense, and luscious (take this descriptive line: Summer’s heat had never really arrived, nor the cold in turn, and everything living now seemed to yearn for sun with the anguish of the unloved.”) You know that the content will focus on some kind of social justice, biodiversity, or environmental issue. You know, too, that at some point, Ms. Kingsolver will cross the line into authorial intrusion based on her passion for the subject she is writing on.

But you keep coming back for more. At least, I do. There is something mesmerizing about a Barbara Kingsolver novel, and something refreshing about a writer who combines a solid scientific background with stunning prose.

This book is entitled Flight Behavior, and for good reason. It opens with a young Appalachian woman – Dellarobia Turnbow – ready to take flight from her shotgun marriage and closed-in life with two young children. On her way up the mountain to engage in an affair, she views an astounding natural phenomenon that changes everything for her.

The core of the novel focuses on that phenomenon, centering on the migratory patterns of the bright orange Monarch butterfly, usually viewed only in Mexico. The topic is climate change and Ms. Kingsolver slashes through the obtuse definitions with language anyone can understand. Dellarobia is paired thematically with a Harvard-educated scientist Ovid Byron, whose lifework is studying the butterflies. He says, “If you woke up one morning, Dellarobia, and one of your eyes had moved to the side of your head, how would you feel about that?” That, in effect, is the same as the butterflies migrating to Appalachia.

There is much to love about this novel. Dellarobia is authentically portrayed: a woman who is confined in a life she has outgrown, complete with two very genuinely created toddlers and a best friend who is not similarly constrained. The duality of science and religion is also tackled. While Barbara Kingsolver makes no secret of how she feels about those who piously say, “Weather is the Lord’s business” while polluting our environment, she also concedes to the majesty and mystery of nature, culling in parallels from Job and Noah.

Ultimately, Ms. Kingsolver leaves us with the most important question of all: “what was the use of saving a world that had no soul left in it. Continents without butterflies, seas without coral reef…What if all human effort amounted basically to saving a place for ourselves to park?” The interconnectedness of all nature’s creatures – and our true place in our own lives and in the lives of the universe – is a message that lives on in this reader’s mind long after the last page is closed.

AMAZON READER RATING: stars-4-0from 1,546 readers
PUBLISHER: Harper Perennial; Reprint edition (June 4, 2013)
REVIEWER: Jill I. Shtulman
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK? YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE: Wikipedia page on Barbara Kingsolver
EXTRAS: Reading Guide and Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION: Read our reviews of:

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]]> /2013/flight-behavior-by-barbara-kingsolver/feed/ 0 THE LACUNA by Barbara Kingsolver /2009/the-lacuna-by-barbara-kingsolver/ /2009/the-lacuna-by-barbara-kingsolver/#comments Fri, 11 Dec 2009 02:39:08 +0000 /?p=6758 Book Quote:

“Memories do not always soften with time; some grow edges like knives.”

Book Review:

Review by Lynn Harnett (DEC 10, 2009)

Harrison Shepherd’s odyssey through three tumultuous decades of the 20th century begins in a lonely boyhood between two worlds – America and Mexico. It continues through the Depression and World War II, and culminates in the ugly, surreal hysteria of the Red Scare.

Along the way Shepherd mixes plaster for the great Mexican muralist Diego Rivera, becomes a confidant of his colorful wife, the artist Frida Kahlo, serves as secretary to the exiled Bolshevik, Leon Trotsky, and becomes a celebrity in his own right. Readers will bond with his kind soul, his boundless curiosity, his youthful exuberance and his self-deprecating wit as he experiences the best and worst his times have to offer.

An ambitious, tightly organized novel, Kingsolver’s latest is mostly assembled from journals Shepherd began keeping as a boy – journals in which the pronoun “I” is seldom used. Archivist’s notes, letters to and from friends and enemies, newspaper articles (both real and fictional), and even congressional testimony offer added perspectives.

Uprooted from his suburban Virginia home at age 12 in 1929 and transplanted to an isolated island hacienda in his mother’s native Mexico, Shepherd pretty much brings himself up, making himself useful in the kitchen and spending hours learning to navigate a mysterious underwater cave (the first lacuna). With his feckless mother flitting (downhill) from lover to lover, Harrison’s schooling is sparse, but his reading is prodigious.

When his mother takes up with a man from Mexico City, Shepherd avoids a Catholic school for hopeless cases by putting his bread-making skills to work mixing plaster for Diego Rivera. Eventually his American father is induced to take him back – but only to put him in a Washington boarding school.

Ostracized by the other students, he takes up with an older boy whose formal education has been interrupted by the Depression, but whose knowledge of the world is as fascinating as it is mystifying. Most of this tortuous interlude is expunged (the relevant journal destroyed in 1947), and the reader will surmise that Shepherd’s budding homosexuality has something to do with that.

Returning to Mexico, he joins the Rivera-Kahlo household as a domestic and is treated as a servant or a member of the family as it suits them. Ardent communists, the flamboyant artists are all for workers’ rights – as long as it doesn’t impinge on the smooth workings of their household.

Trotsky takes refuge with them and Shepherd takes to him immediately – a kindly, fatherly, unflappable figure – pursuing his cause despite Stalin’s death threats and rabid persecution by the press. After Trotsky’s assassination, Shepherd flees Mexico for the U.S., the household in upheaval and under suspicion.

Settling in Asheville, N.C., Shepherd, not yet 30, becomes an agoraphobic recluse, his sexuality carefully closeted, his exuberance taking flight in his writing. His first novel – a swashbuckling tale of Aztec downfall – is an immediate bestseller. He struggles to reconcile his horror of the limelight with his joy in success.

As fame begins to get out of hand, he hires a sympathetic widow, Violet Brown, who becomes his amanuensis and eventually his archivist. A countrywoman with a practical turn of mind, Brown nudges him into the world and discovers a wider world for herself.

Her loyalty and the hysteria of the anti-communist tidal wave drive the last section of the book, while Shepherd guards himself with dry wit and naivety, his privacy battered by rumor, half-truths and lies.

The lacuna – a gap in the whole – directs the flow of this vivid, atmospheric story. From the start Shepherd shapes himself by what’s missing. An absent father and flighty mother make him resourceful. He notes the strangeness of the world around him, makes friends with people unlike himself. He attaches himself by being helpful and acquires skills that come in useful throughout his life.

Sources outside the journal fill in some of the things he leaves out – from book reviews to hints at his sexual life – as well as pointing out the sometimes yawning abyss between truth and perception.

The book is as demanding as it is captivating. The form sometimes leaves a distance (yes, a gap) between the reader and the protagonist, which can be exasperating. And Kingsolver’s left-leaning politics are almost shrill in their insistence on outrage.

These are small quibbles, however, and Kingsolver’s mastery of the partnership between big themes and personal engagement should please her fans and win new ones.

AMAZON READER RATING: stars-4-0from 620 readers
PUBLISHER: Harper (November 3, 2009)
REVIEWER: Lynn Harnett
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK? YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE: Wikipedia page on Barbara Kingsolver
EXTRAS: Reading Guide and Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION: Read our reviews of:

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