Prodigal Summer by Barbara Kingsolver

 

In a sentence, this book is about love, loss, and the environment. It's made up of the stories of three women who are living in a small struggling area of farmland at the base of a mountain in southern Appalachia. A wildlife biologist lives a reclusive life in a rustic mountain cabin, observing a newly-arrived pack of coyotes, until a young hunter interrupts her solitude. An entomologist from the city moves to the small town for love, and eventually has to decide whether to stay and care for the land she's come to love and become part of the large farming family or go back to the city. Just down the road, sparks fly as a couple of elderly neighbors – one with an organically grown apple orchard and the other with a dream to repopulate a decimated species of chestnut tree – feud over how to care for the land.

Over the course of a summer, the three determined women fight for what they want and discover how they are connected.

I really loved this book. Its pace is languorous and the language is lush and beautiful. The reader is surrounded with stories of love and loss, and presented with the challenges of the balance between farming and mastering the land and protecting the wild. I've read a couple of other books by Barbara Kingsolver – Flight Behavior and The Lacuna – and I enjoyed those as well. I love the depth and nuance of her characters. Happily, she's got quite a few books out there, so I'll keep picking them up.