![]() ![]() As each of the protagonists seeks to escape the intricacies of human life, their fascinations with nature become vehicles for their interactions with other humans, linking them back to their own species. And Deanna, a lean mountain woman, jealously guards a newly arrived coyote family in the forest. Lusa, a newly widowed outsider, buries her grief in the insect world, stripping the complexities of human emotion down to the single filaments on the wing of a moth. The aged Garnett desperately tries to save the disappearing American Chestnut tree, crossing and re-crossing genes. ![]() Each of the three protagonists looks to the wild to solve their essentially human problems. In this small farming community on the edge of a great forest, the contact between human and nature is still immediate and meaningful in a way it is not in the concrete and stone of Cambridge. Kingsolver interweaves three story strands set in the fictional Zebulon County near the border of North Carolina and Tennessee. Most readers probably know Kingsolver from the award-winning “Poisonwood Bible,” published two years before “Prodigal Summer.” Like “Poisonwood,” the newer novel explores the relationship between people and the land they live on, this time in southern Appalachia. ![]() Kingsolver’s “Prodigal Summer” is a 444-page celebration of both the wildness that unites humans with the natural world and the deep emotional capacity that make us unique. ![]() Barbara Kingsolver understands that human life boils down to three basic essentials-birth, death, and sex. ![]()
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