Review by New York Times Review
DELLAROBIA TURNBOW is about to fling herself into a love affair that will wreak havoc on her placid life, and she's worried about what she's wearing. She's frantic with desire, frantic with passion, also frantic for a cigarette. Her boots, bought secondhand, "so beautiful she'd nearly cried when she found them," are killing her. It's the wettest fall on record in southern Appalachia, and she has to be hiking in pointed-toe calfskin on a steep, muddy trail to a deserted cabin for an illicit rendezvous. All sorts of "crazy wanting," both prosaic and earth-shattering, are shot through the intricate tapestry of Barbara Kingsolver's majestic and brave new novel, "Flight Behavior." Her subject is both intimate and enormous, centered on one woman, one family, one small town no one has ever heard of - until Dellarobia stumbles into a life-altering journey of conscience. How do we live, Kingsolver asks, and with what consequences, as we hurtle toward the abyss in these times of epic planetary transformation? And make no mistake about it, the stakes are that high. Postapocalyptic times, and their singular preoccupation with survival, look easy compared with this journey to the end game. Yet we must also deal with the pinching boots of everyday life. Those boots are practically the only thing Dellarobia can call her own. Her children are constantly snatching things from her hands: her hairbrush, the TV remote, "the soft middle part of her sandwich." Her husband, Cub, has become oblivious to Dellarobia's sharp, flame-haired beauty. They've been together since she got pregnant at the age of 17, derailing her plans to attend college and escape their small Tennessee town. And then Dellarobia's life is upended, not by a tryst but by an insect. She is stopped in her tracks by a valley blazing "with its own internal flame." As she gazes in frightened awe, words of Scripture come to mind. Whatever else it is - and, naturally, she isn't wearing her glasses - it's a miracle of "unearthly beauty." In fact, it looks to Dellarobia "like the inside of joy." She turns around, "seeing straight through to the back of herself," abandoning her lover. The vision turns out to be of such enormous consequence that the world will soon arrive on her doorstep. One of the gifts of a Kingsolver novel is the resplendence of her prose. She takes palpable pleasure in the craft of writing, creating images that stay with the reader long after her story is done. The church choir sings a hymn, "dragging it like a plow through heavy clay"; the pastor uses "his hands to push and pull his congregants as if kneading dough and making grace rise." Dellarobia walks under "this mess of dirty white sky like a lousy dry wall job." Her husband's gentleness is "merely the stuff he was made of, like the fiber content of a garment." The region's almost biblical rainstorms have the local people invoking Noah. Rivers overflow their banks, trees are uprooted, slabs of mud slide down mountains - and then comes the miraculous arrival of a colony of migrating monarch butterflies, its flight plan, evolved over centuries, thrown off by the chaotic weather patterns of a warming Earth. Now nothing is on firm ground. Dellarobia has learned to be wary of the subject of climate change; she doesn't "believe" in it. She feels, at first, that the butterflies are a gift of the Lord's grace. (However, she does believe in grammar, and resents the minister's use of "covenant" as a verb.) Before too long, though, she's forced to sort out matters of faith - and science. The arrival of the butterflies is of enormous consequence to Dellarobia's town. Some want to exploit it for sightseeing. Some want to sell the woods to pay off a looming debt. As the media exploit their unsophisticated subjects, Dellarobia notices that "nobody was asking why the butterflies were here; the big news was just that they were." And she begins to wonder why everyone is talking right past one another, hearing only what they want to hear. There are miracles, but there is also daily life to be lived. Throughout her fiction, the exigencies of work, and the classes of people who do that work, have been among Kingsolver's great subjects. Here she deftly handles the relentless labor of sheep shearing, yarn dying, even child minding, with all those sticky fingers and sodden, sagging diapers. A scientist named Ovid Byron arrives to study the monarchs, or King Billies, as locals have called them since colonial times, after the royal colors of the Protestant settlers' prince, William of Orange. The monarchs, a unique "super insect" unlike anything else on earth, have been Ovid's lifelong obsession. He introduces Dellarobia (and her young son, who has the makings of a scientist) to an entirely new kind of work. Ovid is an entomologist and an ecologist - which, he acerbically reminds her, means he studies "biological communities. How populations interact. It does not mean recycling aluminum cans." He is measuring the butterflies' response to an unreliable climate. Their habitat in Mexico is threatened, but in Appalachia they're also threatened, by unrelenting rains and freezing temperatures. As he watches the unfolding of what's shaping up to be a mass extinction, he explains that the only thing scientists disagree over is "how to express our shock" about climate change. For caustic wit, nothing tops the tonedeaf environmental activist exhorting Dellarobia to shrink her family's carbon footprint: "Fly less." No one in Dellarobia's family has ever been on a plane. But perhaps the most touchingly contrasting scenes involve the costs of things in different people's daily lives. On a Christmas shopping trip to buy presents for her children at the local dollar store, most of what Dellarobia finds is too expensive. But when she helps the scientists unpack crates of finely calibrated equipment to construct a field laboratory, they casually toss out price tags: things cost "maybe a few thousand dollars" and "in the neighborhood of two grand." When Dellarobia presents him with a scheme to save the butterflies by shipping them to a warmer place, Ovid recoils. "That is a concern of conscience," he tells her. "Not of biology. Science doesn't tell us what we should do. It only tells us what is." But Ovid isn't always so clinically detached. He wonders, as he explains to Dellarobia about diminishing coral reefs and dying insects, "What was the use of saving a world that has no soul left in it." Kingsolver makes it obvious that Dellarobia is also a kind of ecologist, concerned with the way she and the other members of her community adjust - or don't - to their unusual circumstances. What behavior is hard-wired? When and how do people have real choices? Ovid enlarges Dellarobia's world. "Every day she rose and rose to the occasion of this man." An unanchored line of poetry, a vestige of class time with the one good teacher she ever had, drifts into Dellarobia's mind: "Rage, rage against the dying of the light." Dylan Thomas's villanelle bears a message for all of us in these difficult times: "Do not go gentle into that good night, / Old age should burn and rave at close of day." Dellarobia will always sail on a wing and a prayer - that is how she is - but the monarchs open her heart to a crazy wanting to protect something larger, nothing less than this gorgeous endangered world of ours. The heroine of Kingsolver's novel, who doesn't 'believe' in climate change, is forced to sort out faith from science. Dominique Browning is the senior director of MomsCleanAirForce.org. She blogs at SlowLoveLife.com.
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [November 11, 2012]
Review by Booklist Review
*Starred Review* Drawing on both her Appalachian roots and her background in biology, Kingsolver delivers a passionate novel on the effects of global warming. Dellarobia Turnbow got pregnant in high school; now, some 11 years into her unhappy marriage, she's ready for a big change, and she thinks she's found it with a randy young telephone lineman. But on her way to a rendezvous, she is waylaid by the sight of a forest ablaze with millions of butterflies. Their usual migratory route has been disrupted, and what looks to be a stunningly beautiful view is really an ominous sign, for the Appalachian winter could prove to be the demise of the species. The phenomenon draws the whole world to Dellarobia's doorstep scientists, the media, hordes of tourists and gives her new and galvanizing insight into her poverty-stricken life on the sheep farm of her disapproving in-laws. Kingsolver, as always a fluent and eloquent writer, skillfully sets the hook of her fascinating story before launching into activist mode with more than a few pointed speeches delivered by an eminent scientist (and Kingsolver stand-in). By that time, though, readers will be well and truly smitten with feisty, funny, red-haired Dellarobia and her determined quest to widen the confines of her world. HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: On the heels of the beloved author's best-selling The Lacuna (2009), which won the Orange Prize, her latest novel will receive a 500,000-copy first printing and be supported by an eight-city author tour.--Wilkinson, Joanne Copyright 2010 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
With her powerful new novel, Kingsolver (The Lacuna) delivers literary fiction that conveys an urgent social message. Set in a rural Tennessee that has endured unseasonal rain, the plot explores the effects of a bizarre biological event on a Bible Belt community. The sight that young wife and mother Dellarobia Turnbow comes upon-millions of monarch butterflies glowing like a "lake of fire" in a sheep pasture owned by her in-laws-is immediately branded a miracle, and promises a lucrative tourist season for the financially beleaguered Turnbows. But the arrival of a research team led by sexy scientist Ovid Byron reveals the troubling truth behind the butterflies' presence: they've been driven by pollution from their usual Mexican winter grounds and now face extinction due to northern hemisphere temperatures. Equally threatening is the fact that her father-in-law, Bear, has sold the land to loggers. Already restless in her marriage to the passive Cub, for whom she gave up college when she became pregnant at 17, unsophisticated, cigarette-addicted Dellarobia takes a mammoth leap when she starts working with the research team. As her horizons expand, she faces a choice between the status quo and, perhaps, personal fulfillment. Spunky Dellarobia is immensely appealing; the caustic view she holds of her husband, in-laws, and neighbors, the self-deprecating repartee she has with her best friend Dovey, and her views about the tedium of motherhood combined with a loving but clear-eyed appraisal of her own children invest the narrative with authenticity and sparkling humor. Kingsolver also animates and never judges the uneducated, superstitious, religiously devout residents of Feathertown. As Dellarobia flees into a belated coming-of-age, which becomes the ironic outcome of the Monarchs' flight path to possible catastrophe in the collapse of a continental ecosystem, the dramatic saga becomes a clarion call about climate change, too lucid and vivid for even skeptics to ignore. 8-city author tour. One-day laydown. (Nov. 5) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
Dellarobia Turnbow is in a perpetual state of fight or flight. Married at 17 to kind, dull Cub, she finds even the satisfaction of motherhood small consolation for the stultifying existence on her in-laws' struggling Tennessee sheep farm. When a fluke of nature upends the monotony of her life, Dellarobia morphs into the church's poster child for a miracle, an Internet phenomenon, and a woman on the verge of unexpected opportunity as scientists, reporters, and ecotourists converge on the Turnbow property. Orange Prize winner Kingsolver (The Lacuna) performs literary magic, generously illuminating both sides of the culture wars, from the global-warming debate to public eduction in America. It's a joy to watch Dellarobia and her precocious son, Preston, blossom under the tutelage of entomologist Ovid Byron. V-ERDICT Like E.O. Wilson in his novel Anthill, Kingsolver draws upon her prodigious knowledge of the natural world to enlighten readers about the intricacies of the migration patterns of monarch butterflies while linking their behavior to the even more fascinating conduct of the human species. Highly recommended. [See Prepub Alert, 5/4/12.]-Sally Bissell, Lee Cty. Lib. Syst., Ft. Myers, FL (c) Copyright 2012. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
A young woman discovers her rural Tennessee community has been invaded by monarch butterflies in this effective tear-jerker cum environmental jeremiad from Kingsolver (The Lacuna, 2009, etc.). At 17, English honor student Dellarobia thought she would escape a future of grim rural poverty by attending college. Instead, she got pregnant and married. Now 27, feeling stifled by the responsibility of two young children she loves and a husband she tolerates, Dellarobia is heading to her first adulterous tryst when she happens upon a forested valley taken over by a host of brilliant orange butterflies that appear at first like a silent fire. She skips the tryst, but her life changes in unexpected ways. Soon after, Dellarobia leads her sweet if dim husband, Cub, to the butterflies, and they become public knowledge. The butterflies have landed in Tennessee because their usual winter habitat in Mexico has been flooded out. The local church congregation, including Dellarobia's mother-in-law, Hester, embraces the butterflies' arrival as a sign of grace. Influenced by her beloved preacher, usually antagonistic Hester (a refreshingly complex character) becomes a surprising ally in convincing Dellarobia's father-in-law not to cut down the forest for much-needed cash, although she is not above charging tourists, who arrive in increasing numbers to view the spectacle. Soon, a handsome black scientist with a Caribbean accent has set up in her barn to study the beautiful phenomena, which he says may spell environmental doom. Dellarobia is attracted to the sophisticated, educated world Dr. Byron and his grad school assistants represent. When she takes a job working with the scientists, the schisms in her already troubled marriage deepen. Yet, she is fiercely defensive against signs of condescension toward her family and neighbors; she really goes after a guy whose list of ways to lower the carbon footprint--"bring your own Tupperware to a restaurant," "fly less"--have no relevance to people trying to survive economically day-by-day. One of Kingsolver's better efforts at preaching her politics and pulling heartstrings at the same time.]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
