Prodigal Summer by Barbara Kingsolver. 

4/5 rating. 444 pages.

Book #33 of 2023. Read August 6, 2023.

This novel tells three intersecting tales of lives near the Virginia-Kentucky border.

One of them is Deanna, a National Forest worker living in the woods and looking to find coyotes. Another is Garnett Walker, an old farmer who at this point is a crotchety old man mad at the world and especially at his organic farming neighbor. He believes to be an upright religious man, but gets put in his place a few times about his beliefs that Genesis’s idea of dominion over the lands does not call people to be STEWARDS and to protect the sacred lives of all things around us.

Lastly, Lusa is a farmer who gets the bold idea to raise goats in a hurry to save her farm.

Barbara does a beautiful job weaving in a whole bunch of nature-filled facts and details of the beauty surrounding all of these stories. The woods are alive and so too are the farms…if we can get back to working WITH the land and don’t kill everything living there with our plethora of noxious pesticides and chemicals!

Quotes:

– “Content for a minute to be just where they were.”

– “Everything alive is connected to every other by fine, invisible threads. Things you don’t see can help you plenty, and things you try to control will often rear back and bite you, and that’s the moral of the story.”

– “Mr. Walker, I’ve always found people love you best if you can laugh at your own foolish misfortunes and keep mum about everyone else’s.”

#prodigalsummer #books #booksread #reading @barbara.kingsolver #nature

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