Prodigal Summer by Barbara Kingsolver

The usual preface: I'm not a book review site...

Book 22 in the 50 Book Challenge: Barbara Kingsolver's Prodigal Summer

It's another book I've had in my TBR pile for over a year and I'm so glad it finally sifted to the top. Great read. I tried to write my thoughts, but couldn't really do the book justice. When you're writing comments (not a review!!) about a book that sports such rich narrative, it's hard to do it justice. My solution? Cut and paste what HarperAcademic had to say:

Barbara Kingsolver, a writer praised for her "extravagantly gifted
narrative voice" (New York Times Book Review), has created with this novel a
hymn to wildness that celebrates the prodigal spirit of human nature, and of
nature itself.
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. At the heart of these intertwined
narratives is a den of coyotes that have recently migrated into the region.
Deanna Wolfe, a reclusive wildlife biologist, watches the forest from her
outpost in an isolated mountain cabin where she is caught off-guard by Eddie
Bondo, a young hunter who comes to invade her most private spaces and confound
her self-assured, solitary life. On a farm several miles down the mountain,
another web of lives unfolds as 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. 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 complexities of a world neither of them
expected.
Over the course of one humid summer, as the urge to procreate
overtakes a green and profligate countryside, these characters find connections
to one another and to the flora and fauna with which they necessarily share a
place. Their discoveries are embedded inside countless intimate lessons of
biology, the realities of small farming, and the final, urgent truth that humans
are only one part of life on earth.
With the richness that characterizes
Barbara Kingsolver's finest work, Prodigal Summer embraces pure thematic
originality and demonstrates a balance of narrative and ideas that only an
accomplished novelist could render so beautifully.

But if I had to sum up this book in a few sentences, I'd say it's like a Merchant & Ivory film: slow paced, not a lot of action, but rich, moving and beautiful.