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It’s winter, and admit it: You’re yearning for the long days of summer. You’re thinking about the deep green of the mountains and the bird calls, and everything in thick bloom. There’s no better time to read Barbara Kingsolver’s “Prodigal Summer,” set in the Virginia mountains and teeming with insects and animals
tangled in lush growth, love and loss, creation and re-creation. Kingsolver, educated as an evolutionary biologist, is the rare writer who can mesh great characters and engaging plot with science and ecology. Reading “Prodigal Summer,” you’ll learn a lot of plant and animal biology—and also a lot about people and their dreams and yearnings. The novel is told by three characters in alternating chapters: Deanna Wolfe, a wildlife biologist whose chapters are all titled “Predators”; Garnett Walker, an old native son who’s determined to revive the American chestnut tree (his chapters aptly titled “Old Chestnuts”); and Lusa Landowski Widener, an entomologist recently married into a large local family and soon left with keeping the family farm afloat, in “Moth Love” chapters. What Kingsolver does so well is create three characters who want something large and concrete that they can champion . . . and something unknown to them until the end of summer. It would be a real spoiler to lay all this out here. Just know that when these characters are talking about coyotes and chestnut trees or baby goats and luna moths, their yearnings lie much deeper, at heart-center. The last chapter of “Prodigal Summer” is a wonderful puzzle: Is Kingsolver writing about a coyote or a human? Finally, in the prodigal-summer world she’s created, it doesn’t much matter. On the long nights of winter, a book brimful of green summer and procreative hope can be a very good thing.
Prodigal Summer by Barbara Kingsolver. HarperCollins Publishers, 2000. 444 pp.
The story above first appeared in our January / February 2023 issue.
