I think I enjoyed most the environmental bend to this book. I learned a lot that I wasn’t expecting while listening to this book. I loved her long, thoughtful reflections on the way ecosystems are structured within the forest. Her plot line follows her fight to convince a wandering hunter why killing predators is detrimental to the ecosystem. My favorite of the three is Deanna, who lives in a cabin on Zebulon National Forest territory, working for the Forest service and trying to keep secret the location of a family of coyotes who have just moved into the park. I liked getting to know each individual character really well. Not much happens in the way of plot here, and the book is over 400 pages! Rather, this story is a character-driven narrative that follows the lives of three people over the course of a summer. It’s the kind of wandering, poetic prose story that makes for difficult reading for me. I’m rather glad that I decided to listen to the audio-book for this story. Over the course of one humid summer, these characters find their connections to one another and to the flora and fauna with whom they share a place.

And a few more miles down the road, a pair of elderly feuding neighbors tend their respective farms and wrangle about God, pesticides, and the possibilities of a future neither of them expected. On a farm several miles down the mountain, Lusa Maluf Landowski, a bookish city girl turned farmer’s wife, finds herself unexpectedly marooned in a strange place where she must declare or lose her attachment to the land that has become her own.

She is caught off-guard by a young hunter who invades her most private spaces and confounds her self-assured, solitary life.

Set in Appalachia, Kingsolver explores nature themes, such as apex predators, the importance of insects, and the impact of chemical spraying in farming, all while tracking the loves and losses of three people within the county of Zebulon.įrom her outpost in an isolated mountain cabin, Deanna Wolfe, a reclusive wildlife biologist, watches a den of coyotes that have recently migrated into the region. Prodigal Summer by Barbara Kingsolver is the story of three individuals and their relationships over the course of one summer.

The prodigal summer review