I just finished Prodigal Summer and thought it was delicious. You probably know Barbara Kingsolver's (a Kentucky native!) works of non-fiction like The Bean Trees and The Poisonwood Bible. If you liked those, you will most certainly like Prodigal Summer. The characters and setting feel so authentic and though I just put the book down a few hours ago, I miss them already! Now I want to go back and re-read some of her other books, too.Here's the jest:
Prodigal Summer weaves together three stories of human love within a larger tapestry of lives inhabiting the forested mountains and struggling small farms of southern Appalachia. From her outpost in an isolated mountain cabin, Deanna Wolfe, a reclusive wildlife biologist, watches a den of coyotes that have recently migrated into the region. She is caught off-guard by a young hunter who invades her most private spaces and confounds her self-assured, solitary life. On a farm several miles down the mountain, Lusa Maluf Landowski, a bookish city girl turned farmer's wife, finds herself unexpectedly marooned in a strange place where she must declare or lose her attachment to the land that has become her own. And a few more miles down the road, a pair of elderly, feuding neighbors tend their respective farms and wrangle about God, pesticides, and the possibilities of a future neither of them expected.
