While Kingsolver's seventh novel, Flight Behavior, does not quite achieve the resonance of Morrison's and Doctorow's masterpieces, this is partly due to its inherently less dramatic material. Doctorow on the collateral damage of war in The March. But done well, it can be both eye-opening and moving: think Charles Dickens on children and poverty in Oliver Twist Upton Sinclair on the meat-processing industry in The Jungle Toni Morrison on the tolls of slavery in Beloved E.L. In the wrong hands, fiction written to convey urgent social messages is as tedious as a political harangue.

How?īarbara Kingsolver's commitment to literature promoting social justice runs so deep that in 1998 she established the Bellwether Prize (now the PEN/Bellwether Prize for Socially Engaged Fiction) to encourage it. Your purchase helps support NPR programming. With a deft and versatile empathy Kingsolver dissects the motives that drive denial and belief in a precarious world.Close overlay Buy Featured Book Title Flight Behavior Author Barbara Kingsolver

As the community lines up to judge the woman and her miracle, Dellarobia confronts her family, her church, her town, and a larger world, in a flight toward truth that could undo all she has ever believed.įlight Behavior takes on one of the most contentious subjects of our time: climate change. The bewildering emergency draws rural farmers into unexpected acquaintance with urbane journalists, opportunists, sightseers, and a striking biologist with his own stake in the outcome. She can only understand it as a cautionary miracle, but it sparks a raft of other explanations from scientists, religious leaders, and the media. As she hikes up a mountain road behind her house to a secret tryst, she encounters a shocking sight: a silent, forested valley filled with what looks like a lake of fire. Now, after a decade of domestic disharmony on a failing farm, she has settled for permanent disappointment but seeks momentary escape through an obsessive flirtation with a younger man.

Characters and reader alike are quickly carried beyond familiar territory here, into the unsettled ground of science, faith, and everyday truces between reason and conviction.ĭellarobia Turnbow is a restless farm wife who gave up her own plans when she accidentally became pregnant at seventeen. In the lyrical language of her native Appalachia, Barbara Kingsolver bares the rich, tarnished humanity of her novel's inhabitants and unearths the modern complexities of rural existence. Flight Behavior transfixes from its opening scene, when a young woman's narrow experience of life is thrown wide with the force of a raging fire.

Barbara kingsolver's flight behavior