I love extracurricular activities. Maybe it’s a holdover from my days doing Speech and Debate, maybe is the fact that I don’t feel like I’m really doing my best unless I am overcommitted by at least 5 hours per week, or maybe I’m still overcompensating for being quite shy and think that these activities will force me to meet more new people. Either way, I love them. Most recently, I received an email on our grad group’s social listserve about a book club. Obviously, sign me up! Obviously, I didn’t finish the book in time. I still read it though. And I adored it. So, here is a virtual book club to start your summer reading. Ready, steady, go!
Barbara Kingsolver is well known for her use of vivid imagery in stories which feel both tangible and delicate. According to her official website, she was born in 1955 in rural Kentucky (southern girl shout out!). She currently lives in southwestern Virginia. She is also unique as a fiction writer due to her education, which includes a BS and a MS in biology and environmental sciences. These themes, of biology and southern culture, are reflected in several of her works. Are you becoming less and less surprised that I jumped at a chance to read one of her books? Despite all this, Flight Behavior is the first of Kingsolver’s works I have had the pleasure of reading. However, after finishing the novel, some of her other popular books have jumped to the top of my reading list, and all her novels are now on my Amazon “Books I want” wishlist (This wish list is public, so feel free to buy me books! Just kidding, but not really). (editor note: I LOVE Kingsolver’s Animal, Vegetable, Miracle and highly recommend it to Rachel.)
What is Flight Behavior about?
Set in the Appalachian region of Tennessee, this novel chronicles the fictional migration of a population of monarch butterflies to a fir forest just outside of a remote farming and manufacturing community. The question of what has brought the butterflies there and their ultimate fate brings together a cast of unlikely characters: the sheep farming family, who own the property the butterflies land upon; the family’s oddball daughter-in-law, who discovers the butterflies; the ecologist and his graduate students, who come to study the insects; the local preacher, who has an unlikely part to play; and the young boy, whose small-town world view is forever altered by the events of the novel. In the end, the fate of the butterflies becomes more than just a biological question. It is a question of culture, faith, and what the future holds for all of us.
