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    Flight Behavior: A Novel
    Flight Behavior: A Novel
    Flight Behavior: A Novel
    Ebook596 pages10 hours

    Flight Behavior: A Novel

    By Barbara Kingsolver

    4/5

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    About this ebook

    New York Times Bestseller

    "An intricate story that entwines considerations of faith and faithlessness, inquiry, denial, fear and survival in gorgeously conceived metaphor. Kingsolver has constructed a deeply affecting microcosm of a phenomenon that is manifesting in many different tragic ways, in communities and ecosystems all around the globe.” — Seattle Times

    A truly stunning and unforgettable work from the extraordinary New York Times bestselling author of The Lacuna (winner of the Orange Prize), The Poisonwood Bible (nominated for the Pulitzer Prize), and Animal, Vegetable, Miracle

    Flight Behavior is a brilliant and suspenseful novel set in present day Appalachia; a breathtaking parable of catastrophe and denial that explores how the complexities we inevitably encounter in life lead us to believe in our particular chosen truths. Kingsolver's riveting story concerns a young wife and mother on a failing farm in rural Tennessee who experiences something she cannot explain, and how her discovery energizes various competing factions—religious leaders, climate scientists, environmentalists, politicians—trapping her in the center of the conflict and ultimately opening up her world. Flight Behavior represents contemporary American fiction at its finest.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherHarperCollins
    Release dateNov 6, 2012
    ISBN9780062124289
    Flight Behavior: A Novel
    Author

    Barbara Kingsolver

    Barbara Kingsolver was born in 1955 and grew up in rural Kentucky. She earned degrees in biology from DePauw University and the University of Arizona, and has worked as a freelance writer and author since 1985. At various times she has lived in England, France, and the Canary Islands, and has worked in Europe, Africa, Asia, Mexico, and South America. She spent two decades in Tucson, Arizona, before moving to southwestern Virginia where she currently resides. Her books, in order of publication, are: The Bean Trees (1988), Homeland (1989), Holding the Line: Women in the Great Arizona Mine Strike (1989), Animal Dreams (1990), Another America (1992), Pigs in Heaven (1993), High Tide in Tucson (1995), The Poisonwood Bible (1998), Prodigal Summer (2000), Small Wonder (2002), Last Stand: America’s Virgin Lands, with photographer Annie Griffiths (2002), Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life (2007), The Lacuna (2009), Flight Behavior (2012), Unsheltered (2018), How To Fly (In 10,000 Easy Lessons) (2020), Demon Copperhead (2022), and coauthored with Lily Kingsolver, Coyote's Wild Home (2023). She served as editor for Best American Short Stories 2001.  Kingsolver was named one the most important writers of the 20th Century by Writers Digest, and in 2023 won a Pulitzer Prize for her novel Demon Copperhead. In 2000 she received the National Humanities Medal, our country’s highest honor for service through the arts. Her books have been translated into more than thirty languages and have been adopted into the core curriculum in high schools and colleges throughout the nation. Critical acclaim for her work includes multiple awards from the American Booksellers Association and the American Library Association, a James Beard award, two-time Oprah Book Club selection, and the national book award of South Africa, among others. She was awarded Britain's prestigious Women's Prize for Fiction (formerly the Orange Prize) for both Demon Copperhead and The Lacuna, making Kingsolver the first author in the history of the prize to win it twice. In 2011, Kingsolver was awarded the Dayton Literary Peace Prize for the body of her work. She is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. She has two daughters, Camille (born in 1987) and Lily (1996). She and her husband, Steven Hopp, live on a farm in southern Appalachia where they raise an extensive vegetable garden and Icelandic sheep. 

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    Reviews for Flight Behavior

    4/5

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    • 4/5
      Flight Behavior" by Barbara Kingsolver is set in Appalachian Tennessee in present day. It's protagonist is the perfect character for those of us who loved the "I always knew I was different" characters as children, only all grown up. The conflict is gobsmacking: a natural anomaly (gorgeous imagery btw) is interpreted by the church as a miracle, but by science as a harbinger of disaster. Ugh, the heartbreak in beauty and the way change transforms through destruction. Good stuff!!!
    • 3/5
      Dellarobia is a little too gorgeous and smart to be believed, but it's an engrossing story bringing out discussions of environment and class. On a day that she's ready to get caught philandering and upend her world, she is deterred by the miracle of a butterfly migration gone awry. It's not terribly far into the future and climate change threatens to upend everyone's world.
    • 4/5
      Page turner - climate change science and a fictitious event of monarch butterflies overwintering in the Appalachians instead of a town in Mexico. Dellarobia is an intense character ... the ending dramatic.
    • 4/5
      Originally posted at Olduvai Reads


      “The flame now appeared to lift from individual treetops in showers of orange sparks, exploding the way a pine log does in a campfire when it’s poked. The sparks spiraled upward in swirls like funnel clouds. Twisters of brightness against gray sky. In broad daylight with no comprehension, she watched. From the tops of the funnels the sparks lifted high and sailed out undirected above the dark forest.”

      A young farmer’s wife is on the way to a tryst with a lover in the woods. She sees an unusual sight, of orange and fire in the valley below, and is startled and confused. She takes it for a sign to head home.

      “She was pressed by the quiet elation of escape and knowing better and seeing straight through to the back of herself, in solitude. She couldn’t remember when she’d had such room for being. This was not just another fake thing in her life’s cheap chain of events, leading up to this day of sneaking around in someone’s thrown-away boots. Here that ended. Unearthly beauty had appeared to her, a vision of glory to stop her in the road. For her alone these orange boughs lifted, these long shadows became a brightness rising. It looked like the inside of joy, if a person could see that. A valley of lights, an ethereal wind. It had to mean something.”

      Dellarobia Turnbow, this ordinary woman with an unusual name, a wife (her husband is known to everyone as Cub as his father is Bear!) and mother of two young children, living in a fictional Appalachian town of Feathertown, Tennessee, is the very person who makes this important, life-changing discovery of Monarch butterflies, whose flight path has been disrupted by changing weather patterns, and have settled in the mountains owned by her husband’s family.

      Soon some scientists arrive, one in particular, Ovid Byron, interests Dellarobia:

      “Tall, dark, and handsome, but extra tall, extra dark. Okay, extra all three. He was so many things, this Mr Buron, that he constituted something of an audience, driving her to invent a performance on the spot.”

      He recognises her intelligence and determination, and hires her to help with his project, studying the Monarch’s unusual location when they were supposed to gather in Mexico.

      While there is a large, engulfing topic up for discussion, and as the scientists and tourists, media and protestors settle in, Dellarobia’s life goes on. And Kingsolver lovingly details these everyday lives with her absorbing prose.

      “But being a stay-at-home mom was the loneliest kind of lonely, in which she was always and never by herself. Days and days, hours and hours within them, and days within weeks, at the end of which she might not ever have gotten completely dressed or read any word longer than Chex, any word not ending in -os, or formed a sentence or brushed her teeth or left a single footprint outside the house. Just motherhood, with its routine costs of providing a largesse that outstripped her physical dimensions.”

      At first I was not sure that I would like Dellarobia, this frustrated woman looking for an escape from her mundane life, but she is smart, and funny, and has fallen into this life of hers after a teenaged mistake. She has the company of a Thelma and Louise kind of best friend in Dovey, single and with more spending money, who loves to text her on Sunday mornings with one-liners she collects from church marquees: “Come ye fishers of men, you catch, God will clean”. And her kids, astute kindergartener Preston and cute as a button Cordelia.

      I enjoyed reading of Dellarobia’s rural life, her small world. And the contrast of her life with that of the scientists, not just Ovid but of the various grad students and volunteers whose paths she crosses. As well as my own life, having spent most of it in the city-state of Singapore, where there isn’t really such a thing as ‘rural’.

      Flight Behaviour is undoubtedly a book, albeit a fictional piece, about climate change. But its rural/lower-class perspective is unique. One of my favourite moments was when Dellarobia read an organisation’s ‘Sustainability Pledge’, a list of things that one could promise to do to lower carbon footprint. Such as bringing one’s own Tupperware to a restaurant for leftovers, when she had not eaten out at a restaurant in two years. Or recycling old computers and turning off monitors when not in use, when she doesn’t have a computer.

      “Try to reduce the intake of red meat in your diet.”

      “Are you crazy? I’m trying to increase our intake of red meat.”

      “Why is that?”

      “Because mac and cheese only gets you so far, is why. We have lamb, we produce that one our farm. But I don’t have a freezer. I have to get it from my in-laws.”

      I read this book pretty much as soon as it arrived in the mail, way way before my tour stop date today, and as I reread parts of it to refresh my memory for this post, I was wowed once again by Kingsolver’s writing:

      “She watched wonder and light come into her daughter’s eyes. Preston stood with the toes of his sneakers at the very edge of the gravel road and his arms outstretched, as if he might take flight. Dellarobia felt the same; the sight of all this never wore out. The trees were covered with butterflies at rest, and the air was filled with life. She inhaled the scent of the trees. Finally a clear winter day, blue dome, dark green firs, and all the space between filled with fluttering gold flakes, like a snow globe. She could see they were finding lift here and there, upwelling over the trees. Millions of monarchs, orange confetti, winked light into their eyes.”

      An unforgettable read.

    • 4/5
      I received this book in exchange for a fair and honest review from TLC Book Tours.Oh, Barbara Kingsolver, you are just as amazing as ever. From the author of one of my all-time favorite books ever (The Poisonwood Bible), comes Flight Behavior.When I heard TLC Book Tours was hosting a tour for a Kingsolver book, I jumped right in. And I’m glad that I did.Flight Behavior is a story about Dellarobia Turnbow, a poor woman in a small town, with a husband she’s not in love with (got pregnant young and got married), and two kids that she adores. Dellarobia’s struggling to find her way, and on her way, she discovers a magnificent sight.Turns out, this magnificent sight (that she didn’t have her glasses on for her to see clearly) is the accumulation of millions of monarch butterflies in the woods on the Turnbow property.Only problem is, her father-in-law is going to have the woods bulldozed to sell off the trees and pay the mortgage.For the full review, visit Love at First Book
    • 3/5
      I am a huge Kingsolver fan, and I am sensitive to the message of this novel. I loved the story line of a woman in a marriage she feels trapped in and her awakening to the fact that she has options.I loved how we get to know people in this small Appalachian town. I did not enjoy the endless encyclopedic information about the Monarch Butterfly and it's migratory patterns and the effect Global Warming is having on this particular species as well as the rest of the planet. I felt that if I was not sensitive to this topic I would not have read the book, or at least would have stopped reading it, and so, as she was preaching to the choir, the author did not have to use the heavy hammer. I did not need a loooong chapter on shopping in a second hand store to get the "reuse it" message, a few paragraphs would suffice.

      This felt like another instance where an author is so successful that editors dare not suggest or order cuts (talking to you John Irving!) that would make a novel more concise and less rambling, and, to me, boring.
    • 5/5
      Standard Kingsolver excellence.
    • 5/5
      Kingsolver is always a socially-conscious novelist, and here her concern is climate change and the human causes of and responses to it. But she is also a master at creating fully developed characters who evolve in brilliantly described landscapes.Dellarobia Turnbow is climbing a mountain to a lover's tryst, escaping her narrow, mundane life married to a sheep farmer, caring for two small children when she happens upon an extraordinary sight: The flame now appeared to lift from individual treetops in showers of orange sparks, exploding the way a pine log does in a campfire when it's poked. The sparks spiraled upward in swirls like funnel clouds. Twisters of brightness against gray sky. In broad daylight with no comprehension, she watched. From the tops of the funnels the sparks lifted high and sailed out undirected above the dark forest....She was on her own here, staring at glowing trees. Fascination curled itself around her fright. This was no forest fire. She was pressed by a quiet elation of escape and knowing better and seeing straight through to the back of herself, in solitude. She couldn't remember when she'd had such room for being. This was not just another fake thing in her life's cheap chain of events, leading up to this day of sneaking around in someone's thrown-away boots. Here that ended. Unearthly beauty had appeared to her, a vision of glory to stop her in the road. For her alone these orange boughs lifted, these long shadows became a brightness rising. It looked like the inside of joy, if a person could see that. A valley of lights, an ethereal wind. It had to mean something. What Dellarobbia happened upon was a colony of monarch butterflies, millions of them, displaced and come to winter in the dicey climate of southern Appalachia. When her discovery becomes public, the life of her family, her community and the entomologist who has spent his career studying monarch behavior are irrevocably changed.A wondrous book by a novelist at the height of her powers.
    • 3/5
      Boring domestic and farm details interspersed with preachy, pedantic science. It was just ok for me.
    • 5/5
      Flight Behavior by Barbara Kingsolver follows Dellarobia Turnbow's accidental discovery of millions of monarch butterflies wintering on her husband's family farm in rural Tennessee instead of in Mexico. Dellarobia married her husband, Cub, at seventeen when she found herself pregnant. Now she is 28 and unhappy in her current life, the stay at home mother of two living in the shadow, and under the thumb, of her husband's parents. She discovered the butterflies when she had all intentions of running away, looked like a lake of fire to her and resulted in sending her back home.

      "The flame now appeared to lift from individual treetops in showers of orange sparks, exploding the way a pine log does in a campfire when it's poked. The sparks spiraled upward in swirls like funnel clouds. Twisters of brightness against a gray sky." (pg. 14) “Unearthly beauty had appeared to her, a vision of glory to stop her in the road. For her alone these orange boughs lifted, these long shadows became a brightness rising. It looked like the inside of joy, if a person could see that. A valley of lights, an ethereal wind. It had to mean something." (pg. 15-16)”

      Her "vision" ends up being called a miracle and may result in saving her family financially, but the monarchs are actually a disturbing result of something much more ominous. When word of the monarchs gets out, a college professor, Dr. Ovid Byron, arrives along with others, to study the phenomena and try to find an explanation for what could result in the demise of the monarchs. Additionally, Bear, Dellarobia's father-in-law, is also a real threat to the monarchs as he is strapped for cash and plans to have the area the butterflies are in logged, clear cut. With her husband Cub a passive follower of his parent's wishes and a mother-in-law, Hester, who has never liked Dellarobia, it seems she is the only one listening to the warnings of Dr. Ovid and the other researchers.

      Flight Behavior can be found in many of the characters. Dellarobia is obviously fighting her desire to flee. But it soon becomes clear that all the characters have something that they are fleeing from or would like to escape or even run toward. Even as the monarchs are in a new wintering area that is most certainly not going to be hospitable to them, all the people coming to study or see the butterflies are moving into Dellarobia's world, one that they don't understand and hold many assumptions about. The news media spins the story of the butterflies into a miracle rather than telling the horrible truth they really portend.

      Kingsolver uses her both her degrees in biology and Appalachian roots as she delves into the effects of global warming in Flight Behavior. Rather than ramming the information and how we can help into the novel, she takes it to the level of Dellarobia. One good example occurs about 2/3rds of the way through the novel when Dellarobia is told what is in a pamphlet on how she can help prevent climate change by a man who says that her people (implying local hicks) need to read the information more than anyone. The thing is that most of the ways people can help that are in the pamphlet don't apply to her at all. She doesn't eat out; she doesn't make unnecessary trips anywhere. She always shops at thrift stores. She is actually more on track because of necessity than many of the citizens the man assumes are better informed.

      Flight Behavior has been on several lists as the best book of the year or a notable book to read. The laudatory comments are well deserved. It is an extremely well written novel that delivers a message without becoming too heavy handed. I'll admit that even though I didn't care for the character of Dellarobia at first, I did come to appreciate her and the growth she shows in Flight Behavior. Even as the scientists struggle to answer questions of why this is happening, Dellarobia asks and answers her own questions of why concerning her life and choices. Flight Behavior is certainly a novel that held my rapt attention and I very highly recommend.

      Disclosure: I received an advanced reading copy of this book from the publisher and TLC for review purposes.


    • 5/5
      Finally! Taylor and Lou Ann are back in the form of Dellarobia, the one whio didn't get away. Trapped in her Appalachian home and family this young woman is caught up in the wonder and tragedy of monarch butterflies getting lost in an environmental disaster of frightening proportions. The novel is a gripping character study as well as a plea to stop destroying the earth. It should be required reading for everybody who can afford to consume more than the planet can afford.
    • 4/5
      Lots of detail in this book about the migratory behavior of butterflies along with an internal narrative of the main character, Dellarobia. Change is the theme - environmental and human - beautifully crafted and developed by Kingsolver. I appreciated the delicate parenting touches, strife within a family, and desire to be "true to self". Overall, an intelligent, witty, and thought-provoking book with long sections of informational science woven throughout.
    • 4/5
      Woo, finally read an ARC before it got published!
      It took me a little while to get into this one, maybe because I read it right after NW by Zadie Smith which had some of the same thoughts about the oppressiveness of being a mother of young children (could we maybe please have a book about a woman with NO children who is happy about it? There are books about women with children who are happy, and women with children who are unhappy, and women without children who are unhappy, but what about us, the happy childless? Or, I suppose, books about men in any of these categories?!)
      Anyway where was I? Well, after a while I really got pulled into the story. I was definitely walking and reading!
      Still, I think I'd really give this 3.5 stars, because as much as I enjoyed it I don't think she went anywhere new. And it was a little preachy.
    • 4/5
      Overall, I really liked this book. It's the story of a young woman who is not quite happy with her life, but is somewhere between resigned to and content with it. But that life is upended by the discovery of natural occurrence in the woods on her family's farm, bringing attention of the world and her entry into the world of science.Kingsolver wrestles with issues of family, social justice, class, environment, climate change, friendship, faith, and the deep political and social divide that our country wrestles with - which was especially meaningful to me as I read this during the final months of the 2016 presidential election. At times the book felt educational, but in a way I appreciated - because story-telling and approaching from multiple viewpoints seems to be a good way to address some of the issues she raises. I especially appreciated her look at environmental issues from different class perspectives.Some of the jumps in the storyline from one chapter to the next were a bit abrupt for me - I wanted a little more explanation in between - but I did love see Dellarobia grow and change and decide on the course her life would take.
    • 5/5
      It took me quite a long time to get around to reading Flight Behavior by Barbara Kingsolver, which is unlike me, I adore her work, and this one is no exception. Kingsolver ‘s prose is so beautiful, I am almost convinced she could make any topic intriguing. Her characters, as usual are superb, relatable for good and bad, and above all characters I wanted to learn more about as the book progressed. While I have yet to read other reviews, I was surprised to see the rather low scores, perhaps others did not like a story written around the topic of climate change and flight patterns of monarch butterflies, I do not know. What I am certain of is the fact that Kingsolver was able to draw me in by the close of the first page, which honestly is no small feat. There is just something about Kingsolver’s writing that casts a spell over me, now do not get my wrong, this is not as good as The Poisonwood Bible; which if you are reading this review and have yet to read that book by Kingsolver, run out and get the book, afterward, settle in with a cup of tea and enjoy Flight Behavior. I do recommend Flight Behavior to fans of Kingsolver’s, anyone looking for beautifully written books with wonderfully drawn out characters, and especially to book discussion groups as there is quite a bit to discuss.
    • 5/5
      All the mediocre reviews of Flight Behavior had me not that excited to read it, even though I love Barbara Kingsolver's writing. Wrong!!! I loved this book and fell in love with Dellarobia Turnbow and all the characters in this book and actually found the issue oriented premise educational and enlightening. I listened to the audio book which is narrated by Kingsolver and she's amazing, she embodies Dellarobia and all the other character voices are perfect. I chose the audio version because of the not-so-great reviews, this is a book I would normally enjoy reading myself, but now I can wholeheartedly recommend the audio -- totally engrossing and wonderful to hear the author with her native twang and other far reaching character dialects.
    • 4/5
      did not "get' this book to start with and found it almost to be in the past until i gave it another go and actaully got into it , it was the situation and the town that this family were living in that made it seem surreal , but then the butterfly situation and the global warming theory all made sense and the "hopelessness" of life as humans and insects and nature made sense . In the end i really enjoted it . loved her best friend Davey's reality check on everything .
    • 4/5
      This is a traditional novel that does not give one lush language or a feeling of sensory immersion. Rather it is a serious Story with important Themes. So it's not the type of novel I typically read. But I thought it was well thought-out and enjoyable.Its strengths are a breezy, wise-cracking narrative style and an earnest and nuanced take on big issues. It does go on too long, and it has too many cardboard characters. But its worst trait, as a novel, is a certain obviousness: it lays on the environmental and social messages with too heavy of a hand. And I say that despite agreeing with her point of view.Still, it's a thought-provoking book that would be great for book groups.
    • 4/5
      I approached Flight Behavior with mixed emotion. On one hand, I’ve loved every Kingsolver book I’ve ever read and rate her The Poisonwood Bible as one of the best books in my reading lifetime. On the other hand, I roll my eyes (quite literally) at heroines with names like Juniper or Venetia or, in this case, Dellarobia, AND the book was purported to be full of butterflies. Dreams of fluff danced in my head.But Kingsolver tackles a very serious issue in Flight Behavior: climate change, and the real-life destruction of the wintering nesting grounds of North America’s Monarch butterfly population in 2010. That she peoples this drama with the melodramatically named Dellarobia who makes a series of decisions that alienated her from this reader does not lesson the importance of that main issue, or for that matter, the beauty of her writing.For concrete (albeit fictionally set) consequences of a complex issue, you could do far worse than this book.Read this if: you don’t think climate is really changing our world; you recognize that climate change is real and would like great party talking-points on the subject; or you’re a Kingsolver fan. 4 stars
    • 4/5
      Delarobia's narrow existence is suddenly awakened when, hoping to escape from her boring life, goes into the mountain and sees a "miracle." For some unknown reason, the monarchs have migrated to this part of the U.S. With the migration come the scientists who work to determine the cause of the monarch's departure from their conventional migration. Suddenly, Delarobia is discovering things about herself and her life.
    • 5/5
      Dellarobia is a restless farm wife who gave up her own plans when she accidentally became pregnant at 17. After years of domestic disharmony, she encounters a silent, forested valley filled with what looks like a lake of fire. She can only understand it as a miracle, but it sparks a raft of other explanations from scientists, religious leaders, and the media. As the community lines up to judge the woman and her miracle, Dellarobia confronts a truth that could undo all she has ever believed.
    • 5/5
      While the story may not have been the most robust, Kingsolver's talent and craft does not disappoint. I savored each sentence.
    • 4/5
      This is the first book I listened to on my Kindle Fire, and I didn’t enjoy it as much as I should have because I kept confusing the volume with the last page read; on the screen both are yellow bars with arrow tabs. Because of my “learning curve” problem I kept skipping sections and had a difficult time finding my way back or even remembering where I left off. I finally figured it out and listened to a smaller story in one sitting, and really enjoyed it. Oh well, it’s a great story, by a favorite author that I may need to read instead of listen to.The gist of the story is this: a mom is restless in her marriage, and is thinking about hooking up with a man she’d flirted with, but when she goes walking into to hills behind her house to meet up with him she stumbles upon something so beautiful and unusual that it stops her from the tryst. When she shares her discovery, it takes over her family and community and soon word leaks out to the world. There is family drama, nature, climate change, science, biology and the meaning of love thrown into to this mix. I listened to Flight Behavior through Audible.com and I’m rating it 4 stars for the storyline.
    • 4/5
      I have read all of Kingsolver's fiction. I enjoyed the character of Dellarobia because she felt like her earlier characters from Bean Trees and Animal Dreams. Although, the book was preachy and dragged a bit, overall the writing was great and I really felt the poverty of the people. It reminded me how those us who have more tend to take that for granted. This book highlighted the millions who have to spend everyday thinking about every thing they do just to get through the day. The author does a good job of pointing out the futility of our materialism and how much it consumes us. She ties this together with the ongoing ecological issue of the butterflies and climate change. I would not recommend this as the first Barbara Kingsolver book to read but this was worthwhile.
    • 5/5
      Near her hardscrabble sheep farm in Tennessee, Dellarobia Turnbow discovers millions of monarch butterflies who have deviated from their normal migration pattern to Mexico. The discovery brings the world to her doorstep, the tourists, the eco-activists, and the media among them. Also to arrive is Ovid Byron, a lepidopterist who hires Dellarobia to help research why the butterflies have arrived in Appalachia.The answer soon becomes clear: climate change as a result of global warming. The butterflies’ Mexican home has been destroyed by flooding exacerbated by deforestation. Initially, Dellarobia is not a believer in climate change; gradually, however, she changes her mind as evidence is presented to her. Unfortunately others in the community are not so open-minded; her father-in-law, for example, wants to log the mountain which the butterflies have chosen for their winter home. The blindness of climate change deniers is addressed strongly by Ovid: “’What scientists disagree on now . . . is how to express our shock. The glaciers that keep Asia’s watersheds in business are going right away. . . . The Arctic is genuinely collapsing. Scientists used to call these things the canary in the mine. What they say now is, The canary is dead. We are at the top of Niagara Falls . . . in a canoe. . . . We got here by drifting, but we cannot turn around for a lazy paddle back when you finally stop pissing around. We have arrived at the point of an audible roar. Does it strike you as a good time to debate the existence of the falls?’’’ (367)The serious social message is expertly intertwined with a personal story. Dellarobia is unhappy and frustrated with her life. She feels trapped in her marriage to Cub, a dim-witted, unimaginative, passive man overshadowed by his parents. Though he is decent, good-hearted, and well-meaning, he cannot provide her with an escape from their economically and intellectually impoverished life. Working for Ovid serves as an awakening for Dellarobia. She gains self-confidence as her horizons expand and decides to seek personal fulfillment, searching, like the butterflies, for the place where she belongs. Obviously she metamorphoses from caterpillar to butterfly, although at the end she, again like the butterflies, is faced with an uncertain future.There are many Biblical allusions in the novel. Dellarobia sees a flaming forest, like Moses saw a burning bush. References to Noah’s flood appear more than once. I foresee students of English literature writing essays analyzing Kingsolver’s use of Biblical allusions to add depth to her novel.This is literary fiction at its best; it combines an interesting plot and a dynamic protagonist with an urgent message: the world is a “mess made by undisciplined humans” (25) who must stop behaving like “ignorant little dumb-heads” (41) or “the world [will] fall down around them” (25).
    • 5/5
      Dellarobia is a young parent disenchanted with her marriage. She is the first to encounter a large population of Monarch butterflies have found their way to her Appalachian mountain area. The townspeople take this beautiful sight for a religious blessing, but the scientists who arrive bring dire news of climate change.The writing is beautiful, the characters are believable, and it is an absorbing multi-layered story.
    • 5/5
      Transfixing. Best piece of fiction I have listened to in a long time. Characters, setting, and the many messages were seamless and Kingsolver's reading of it was regionally perfect. The story of human and natural communities intertwined facing unsettling change.
    • 5/5
      I loved the premise of this book...taking a very realistic environmental situation and describing how it would change one person's entire life. Barbara Kinsolver's writing is beautiful and the characters are finely drawn and complicated. The only reason that I did not give it a full five stars is that at times I wondered if Dellarobia, the main character, could exist in real life. But this is a small thing and an opinion that could change upon second reading. Overall, this is one of my favorite books that I have recently read.
    • 5/5
      Barbara Kingsolver is one of my favorite authors, and I loved her new book Flight Behavior. The main character, Dellarobia Turnbow, is one of the most multi-dimensional characters I have met in a while. She is a stay-at-home mom who loves her two children, but also feels overwhelmed by them. She was a teenage bride who has a rocky, but very real relationship with her husband Cub. She is the outsider on a farm run by her in-laws, Bear and Hester, and she dreams of doing something more. When she discovers that monarch butterflies have migrated to the Turnbow farm, she is curious and open to understanding how environmental changes may be responsible for this phenomenon, something that others in her small Appalachian town are unwilling to believe. As the story unfolds, Dellarobia comes to understand herself better even as she struggles to understand the plight of the butterflies. Just like Dellarobia, many of the supporting characters in the book were genuine and interesting too. The scientist who comes to study the butterflies, Dellarobia's best friend Dovey, Dellarobia's son Preston, and even her toddler daughter Cordelia came to life on the page and rarely struck a false note. The problems that sprang from engagemental changes were similar enough to those that we've already seen occurring in the world to be believable, while also being frightening because they are the next step down a slippery slope. As always, Kingsolver wraps the story in beautiful language, creating pictures on the page that will stay in my mind long after I shelve this volume in the Kingsolver section of my favorite books.
    • 5/5
      This is an incredible book. I was thinking of all the books she has written and each book is different, special and meaningful without being preachy. I want to go follow the butterflies. I want to walk and not drive.

    Book preview

    Flight Behavior - Barbara Kingsolver

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