Fantastic book about climate change, and also about how people change.

Another great novel from Kingsolver. Some may find it preachy ... climate change ... man destroying the earth ... to me, it's done well and I'm "in her choir" anyways.

My second Barbara Kingsolver book. I think one way to judge authors is if their characters ring so true that you can incorporate them into your knowlege of human behavior. Barbara Kingsolver does this admirably, with enough flesh and background and authentic-seeming dialogue that a kind of person you might never know becomes real.

How a nature book essentially about climate change can be so interesting is a mystery to me. It was Kingsolver's way with words and her humor shining through in her characters that did it. Dellarobia lives in the Appalachian South and Kingsolver tells a fictitious tale of Monarch Butterflies literally moving to her backyard. The book being based on fact, is essentially informative but woven as it is in a perfect tale of human behaviour it remains very interesting. I couldn't put it down.

too simply written for me. didn't get far into it. style not for me. i'll try another one of hers to see if it's any better.

I enjoyed the book and thought Kingsolver did a good job of telling her story and conveying her Important Message. She's sympathetic to folks on both sides of the scientist/redneck divide. She's also an expert at depicting the daily life of young mothers, as she did so memorably in "The Bean Trees" and "Pigs in Heaven."

A Monarch butterfly migration infests a Southern Appalachian town, turning lives upside down & indicating that something is deeply disturbed in the natural environment. Wonderful humor in the main character, a mother of two young children.

Well, I read the other reviews and feel funny saying this about a Kingsolver book: dull and predictable. Granted, I did not get past the first quarter but I could see where it was going, which is a killer for interest. The main character is simple in mind and spirit, even though much is made of her supposed character development. I found this treatment of a main character condescending to the reader, as if we were being 'educated' along with her. I had high hopes but they were dashed.

It was okay, an interesting story and well-written, but I never really connected with the main character, Dellarobia. She had such an inflated view of herself, thinking she was smarter and just plain better than everyone else in town. Which may have been so, but being smarter than the people in a shithole of a town where people only get the most rudimentary education isn't really saying much. For someone who was supposed to be so smart, she was terrible at figuring things out and taking subtle hints. Her exposure to the wider world (via actual smart people) corrects this point-of-view somewhat, but it didn't really make her any more likable. Nor was she particularly interesting. I found myself skimming a bit with this one. It kept feeling like something really crazy or interesting would happen, but then nothing would. There was this whole scene in a thrift store when I thought maybe her kid would get kidnapped or go missing or something (because Dellarobia wasn't paying any attention to her), but nope. Just a shopping trip in a thrift store, only in the story in order to let Dellarobia seethe about college kids who shop at second-hand stores because they think it's cool, not because they have to. We get it, she's poor and uneducated and bitter about both. All in all, I was disappointed. I have loved all of Kingsolver's other books, so I had rather high expectations.

Set in the present day, Flight Behaviour tells the story of Dellarobia Turnbow, an intelligent 29-year-old woman who was forced to give up her dreams of getting out of her small town farming community when she became pregnant at 17 and married her high school sweetheart. After more than a decade of tending to small children on a failing farm, oppressed by poverty and her antagonistic mother-in-law, Dellarobia has decided to shake things up by surrendering to her desire to have an affair with a handsome younger man. The affair never happens. Instead, as Dellarobia is walking to meet her lover, she encounters a scene so majestic and bewildering that she believes she is witnessing a miracle – and a sign from God telling her to not throw her life away with this affair. What does she witness? How does the sighting change not only her life but that of her whole community? Read her story to find out! Reviewed by TC