Jim Reviews: Prodigal Summer by Barbara Kingsolver
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This is one of those books that you wouldn’t expect to see here on my recommended book list considering my age/gender. This is a great book because it may carry heavy messages but at the same time it has a great plot. This book was one of the books I read for my “Ghosts of Our Ecological Past” class with Christine Battista, which was divided into three sections. This falls into the “ecofeminism” column, which is a scary term that makes men shudder and casual readers shy away but it really isn’t as imposing as it sounds (in this case). It is a combination between feminism and environmentalism, what makes ecofeminism unique is that they are very intertwined.
Prodigal Summer; is more or less three books in one. The first half of the book is split so perfectly along each of the three sub stories that it will leave you wondering why Kingsolver didn’t simply make it into three separate books. The novel is focused around a handful of coyotes that have been found in the woods and how different members of the town are reacting to this. It is a very rural setting with everyone owning their own farms, growing crops, raising cattle, etc. The female protagonists are criticized for a range of things, such as being “outsiders” or “cityfolk” while some are also “too old fashioned”. This miscellanea of criticism plays into the feminist perspective of this novel. The word feminism is often looked at too sternly, this book isn’t saying that men should be relegated to another part of the Earth, just that they are dumb some of the time.
This is a hard book to describe, it is a mixture of 3 different story lines that swirl around a handful of main conflicts. It is definitely worth a look and I would recommend it to anyone, male/female, young/old. I genuinely enjoyed reading it, so it will get a 10/10. Get it here: Prodigal Summer