Prodigal Summer

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Unitarian debaucheries he imagines she's guilty of. And so the stage is set for Kingsolver's latest exploration of her perennial themes of family, community and global interconnectedness.

How does the relationship between Deanna and Eddie Bondo change them both? Should Deanna have told Eddie about the pregnancy? Do you think he already knew and that was one of the reasons he left when he did? As an example of the plot, in the first chapter the story begins in introducing the reader to not only a main character, but also to Nature in the randiness of spring as seen through the human umwelt. It's a thread exploited further as the story progresses, spiked with joy, enmity, loss, and irony. What better way to grab the reader's interest than with hormonal enticement, the subjective issues it engenders, and accompanying pleasures and resentments. In my experience, that's the cornerstone of much of literature. I'm not complaining mind you, I'm for whatever might work to hopefully instill a better understanding of the natural world that sustains us — that for the sake of our futures. It ain't what you don't know that gets you into trouble. It's what you know for sure that just ain't so." ~ Mark Twain There is more to the story to be sure, with characters fleshed out realistically, some even exhibiting a bit of comic relief, plot-line dots to be connected, and the absurdities, misunderstandings, and caring in extended family and neighbor relations. The essence of the story to me though, is our weedy species inability for the most part to recognize what sustains our being any more than our animal cousins do — the connectedness of all life.

Barbara Kingsolver

Writer and director Nicole Kassell’s new feature PRODIGAL SUMMER is a film adaptation of best-selling author Barbara Kingsolver’s novel Prodigal Summer. The film was awarded a Lab Fellowship from the Sloan Foundation in partnership with the Sundance Institute in 2013. It is now in the financing stage. Kassell and Kingsolver are co-writing the screenplay. This is Kassell’s third feature film—her first film was THE WOODSMAN, an adaptation like PRODIGAL SUMMER, but of a play by Steven Fechter. Kassell spoke on the phone with Science & Film about PRODIGAL SUMMER . Along the same lines, the interweaving of characters and narrative voices is great, but about 3/4 of the way through the book every main character had been connected to every other main character in a way that simply felt over the top and a bit trite. Like, we get it, it's a small community and these characters needed to have some kind of theme tying them together, but it got a bit silly by the final connection. Her descriptions of the natural world are lovely. The relationships are complex and sexy and intriguing. My favorite story line is the romance between Deanna and Eddie. It reminds me of the romance in "The River Why", another book I will write about here on goodreads (someday). The three threads begin with "Predators" which follows Deanna, who is a Forest Preserve ranger and lives alone in a small cabin high upon Zebulon Mountain. She unexpectedly begins a romance with a roaming coyote poacher, although Deanna is working tirelessly to protect a hidden den of coyotes. Next is "Moth Love" about newly married Lusa and her adjustment to life on her husband's family farm and the large family that comes along with it. Finally there is "Old Chestnuts" which focuses on Garnett and Nannie, two old folks who have lived next door to each other their whole lives. The cantankerous relationship between them eventually arrives at mutual understanding and a unique sense of harmony. it nearly did. it wasn't bad. i infact enjoyed it more and more as the LONG ASS story went on and on. very little plot. nothing really happening. lots of boring ass inane descriptions of nature that got really old really fast. her previously used narrative device of telling different stories with different narrators each chapter was annoying here. i found i only cared about 1 person's story, and didnt care about any of the other co-protagonists.

This was an odd moment for me to finally get around to reading Barbara Kingsolver’s Prodigal Summer, which has been waiting on my bookshelf for ages. Bursting with energy and appreciation for all living things, the book reminds me that I am not a farmer, that I am not a naturalist––not in the true sense of those words, anyway. It offers a snapshot of my former ambitions that, for whatever reason, did not motivate or entice me in the way I thought they might. Even so, I had no trouble enjoying the scenery while traipsing through this smart and artful novel.

Chapter One: Predators

Prodigal Summer is so stunning. It may be the greatest tribute that a novel has ever paid to a single season (two runners up may be Doctor Zhivago or Ethan Frome for winter) and it is a celebration of. . . well. . . procreation. There were some things I really liked about Prodigal Summer. In particular I really enjoyed Kingsolver's love of the Southern Appalachian ecosystem that comes through loud and clear in the book. She was a biologist before she became a novelist, and her deep understanding of ecology, and her wonder at nature's systems is so well described. It's a good set of interwoven stories, and I enjoyed reading the book.

Kingsolver is an ambitious writer, but here she has bitten off a lot that she doesn't really chew. A richer book might've given life to the hunter's worldview and Bible Belt ignorance rather than setting them up like bowling pins to be Jews are all worshiping the same God. ''There's just some disagreement about which son did or did not inherit the family goods. The same-old, same-old story.'' The kid asks some more dumb questions,It follows three different family’s lives during one prodigal summer. They each had underlying issues and needed a different kind of love, but were highly misunderstood. It was about loving and taking care of the earth, and loving and accepting each other. That I can’t say. But I won’t bite.” He grinned apologetically, it seemed. He was very much younger than she. His left hand reached up to his shoulder, fingertips just brushing the barrel of the rifle strapped to his shoulder. “And I don’t shoot girls.” i put this book down twice and read other things, then brought it on vacation with me and slowly read it over a month. jesus, a month. visions. But in ''Prodigal Summer,'' the characters have all the answers, and you can hardly read a chapter of Kingsolver's lush prose without tripping on a potted lecture by a woman bent on

Prodigal Summer weaves together three stories of human love within a larger tapestry of lives inhabiting the forested mountains and struggling small farms of southern Appalachia. At the heart of these intertwined narratives is a den of coyotes that have recently migrated into the region. Deanna Wolfe, a reclusive wildlife biologist, watches the forest from her outpost in an isolated mountain cabin where she is caught off-guard by Eddie Bondo, a young hunter who comes to invade her most private spaces and confound her self-assured, solitary life. On a farm several miles down the mountain, another web of lives unfolds as 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. 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 complexities of a world neither of them expected.but no. i gave Barb K the benefit of the doubt. i mean, she wrote the Poisonwood Bible, after all. i decided i'd read this entirely, even if it killed me. What may annoy some in this writing are passages of character thoughts that those reading for entertainment only don't want to think about. Even these character thoughts aren't necessarily dispensed as gospel though, as they may be muddled, even contradicted, further on, leaving the reader to ponder the subjective good vs. bad aspects of the natural world that perplex us. Nature is oblivious to our considered rights and wrongs, adapting life forms in moving on, intent on balancing the paradoxical and symbiotic interactions among evolving life forms in preserving a continuum of physical life. At its core, Prodigal Summer is about one thing, and one thing only: sex. I’ve never read a text so unabashedly brimming with sexual imagery and sensuous excess. There’s nothing lurid or depraved about Kingsolver’s exploration of this theme; on the contrary, this novel is an empowering and poetic paean to the glory of sexual reproduction. As the title suggests, the story unfolds over the course of a single summer, a “season of extravagant procreation” in which “the collisions of strangers” generate new and intoxicating mixtures of emotions, ideas, and––of course––genes (51, 6). “There was no engine on earth,” Kingsolver writes, “whose power compared with the want of one body for another” (415). Sex, she teaches us, makes an incomparable contribution to evolutionary robustness, even as it also creates a landscape of genetic diversity in which some individuals are dealt a losing hand: