Flight behavior A novel

Barbara Kingsolver

Sound recording - 2012

Tired of living on a failing farm and suffering oppressive poverty, bored housewife Dellarobia Turnbow, on the way to meet a potential lover, is detoured by a miraculous event on the Appalachian mountainside that ignites a media and religious firestorm that changes her life forever.

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FICTION ON DISC/Kingsolver, Barbara
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Subjects
Genres
Suspense fiction
Published
Prince Frederick, MD : Recorded Books [2012], p2012.
Language
English
Corporate Authors
Recorded Books, LLC, Harper Audio (Firm)
Main Author
Barbara Kingsolver (-)
Corporate Authors
Recorded Books, LLC (-), Harper Audio (Firm)
Edition
Unabridged, [Recorded Books ed.]
Item Description
Title from container.
Recording originally produced by Harper Audio, p2012.
Physical Description
14 compact discs (17 hrs.) : digital ; 4 3/4 in
ISBN
9781470326340
Contents unavailable.
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 Publisher's Weekly Review

Dellarobia Turnbow is an Appalachian farm wife trapped in a loveless marriage. Her life changes when, inexplicably, thousands of orange monarch butterflies descend on the family's woodland. Some townspeople see it as a sign from God; others take advantage of the phenomenon to make money when it becomes a tourist attraction. But the arrival of a butterfly scientist opens Dellarobia's eyes to the frightening implications of climate change-and, at the same time, gives her the courage to escape the confines of her own life. Kingsolver proves an excellent reader of her own work, perfectly conveying both Dellarobia's gossipy, accented smalltown neighbors and the distinctive Jamaican accent of intellectual Ovid, the butterfly scientist. Perhaps most impressive is her narration of Ovid's explanations of the phenomenon: descriptions of monarch butterfly migration patterns and the impact of climate change could have been dry, but Kingsolver's voice is full of the character's passion, which keeps listeners engaged. The author also ably conveys Dellarobia's yearnings and her struggle to deal with the conflict between her home life and her dreams. This is a beautifully realized audio version of a compelling and fascinating novel. A Harper hardcover. (Nov.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review

As Kingsolver states in the afterword to this book, one of the most special moments in her life was being declared a scientist, a title that she bestows on young Preston, the son of Dellaroba Turnbow, in her newest novel. The discovery of what Dellaroba describes as a lake of fire in the forest behind her Appalachian farmhouse turns out to be a mysterious sea of monarch butterflies. Kingsolver has discussed ecological concerns in previous works and here presents a startling and plausible fictive backdrop to discuss the affects of climate change on these insects. She balances the fictional and scientific characters with her usual skill and performs the audio version with a true feel for the characters and their sense of the butterflies. VERDICT Highly recommended as a timely and informative book on a significant current issue. ["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," read the review of the HarperCollins hc, LJ 8/12.-Ed.]-Joyce Kessel, Villa Maria Coll., Buffalo (c) Copyright 2013. 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.