Kingsolver writes well and does capture the sour disenchantment of Lusa's disintegrating marriage perfectly. Since she is my sister's favourite author I may try another one - but I'm not in any rush!

At its core, Prodigal Summer is about one thing, and one thing only: sex. I’ve never read a text so unabashedly brimming with sexual imagery and sensuous excess. There’s nothing lurid or depraved about Kingsolver’s exploration of this theme; on the contrary, this novel is an empowering and poetic paean to the glory of sexual reproduction. As the title suggests, the story unfolds over the course of a single summer, a “season of extravagant procreation” in which “the collisions of strangers” generate new and intoxicating mixtures of emotions, ideas, and––of course––genes (51, 6). “There was no engine on earth,” Kingsolver writes, “whose power compared with the want of one body for another” (415). Sex, she teaches us, makes an incomparable contribution to evolutionary robustness, even as it also creates a landscape of genetic diversity in which some individuals are dealt a losing hand:This book could have been the perfect segue between last month’s reading topic on ecology, and this month’s topic, trendy fictions. It’s an “earthy” story, which takes place in a small town called Egg Fork in Zebulon County, in the Appalachia Mountains. You’re not much of a talker,” he said. “Most girls I know, they’ll yap half the day about something they haven’t done yet and might not get around to.” it doesn't make for the kind of psychologically complex literature Kingsolver is well capable of. Biology may be destiny in the forest, but good fiction -- like good sex -- happens mostly in the head. Narrative Structure- nonlinear storytelling is not accomplished solely through an unconventional conclusion (read: Hollywood happy ending/closure). Kingsolver ends her book in a kind of abstract manner, shifting perspective to some coyotes whose existence in the plot prior to the end point seemed added on. Many minor plot were left unresolved as the coyotes walked off into the Sun, This would have been fine if the rest of the plot has not been so plodding and attentive to every detail in each character's life, but it was. These characters, like all creatures, are connected. There are several large connections between these characters. Deanna's father is also the father of Nannie Rawley's daughter. Garnett is the grandfather to the children Lusa adopts. Both Deanna and Lusa care about the coyotes living on the mountain, as well as the forest behind the Widener home. There are many other smaller details that attach one character to another, including personality traits, the nature that surrounds them, and the growth that takes place in their lives over the course of two seasons.

Very descriptive and calming. Three stories tied into one, and cleaned up neatly at the end. A good summertime read. setting a man straight. ''Any woman will ovulate with the full moon if she's exposed to enough moonlight,'' Deanna explains to Eddie, amazed at ''the obvious animal facts people refused but no. i gave Barb K the benefit of the doubt. i mean, she wrote the Poisonwood Bible, after all. i decided i'd read this entirely, even if it killed me.Kingsolver began her full-time writing career in the mid 1980s as a science writer for the university, which eventually lead to some freelance feature writing. She began her career in fiction writing after winning a short story contest in a local Phoenix newspaper. In 1985 she married Joseph Hoffmann; their daughter Camille was born in 1987. She moved with her daughter to Tenerife in the Canary Islands for a year during the first Gulf war, mostly due to frustration over America's military involvement. After returning to the US in 1992, she separated from her husband. An amazingly intricate and ambitious first novel - ten years in the making - that puts an engrossing new spin on the traditional haunted-house tale. A complex web of human and natural struggle and interdependency is analyzed with an invigorating mixture of intelligence and warmth.

I enjoyed Kingsolver's Poisonwood Bible so much that for some reason I delayed reading this one (does that make sense?). I just liked the idea of another unread novel by her being out there, waiting for me to read -- something I was saving like a piece of rich dark chocolate. While one part of the three characters meshing together really surprised me (& was handled beautifully) others felt forced to tie everyone up a neat, tidy bow. of their own, falling on each other for a serious Gore-Tex-ripping mingling of gametes -- the ''pursuit of eternity,'' biological style.Nicole Kassell: I came to New York to attend Columbia University, and one of the first days of school a fellow student showed a short film he had made—it just blew me away – to see a peer make a film was a revelation. In that moment I knew that’s what I wanted to do. I had always done studio arts, a lot of photography, and I loved music. But film for me was just an instant obsession. At that time Columbia didn’t have an undergraduate major in Film so I majored in Art History and continued with photography, but then started weaseling my way into the Columbia grad Film classes. I got to study with Walter Pena, Annette Insdorf and James Schamus, and had an incredible education there. After Columbia I took two years interning in film and ended up cutting a documentary in San Francisco, and then I got into NYU Tisch’s graduate film program. That was the hands-on boot camp for me. Out of school I made THE WOODSMAN.