Flight Behavior by Barbara Kingsolver... a farming family in a rural area of Tennessee finds a surprising and shocking quirk of nature has landed in their back yard... unexpectedly and, as it turns out, incorrectly.
At first I was disappointed with this book. I love Kingsolver, so I was expecting a book that would grab me and lead me to sit up late at night, not able to put it down. That did not happen.
As I read further I fell more in love with the book. All the aspects that I can think of were done well: excellent character development, beautiful language - her writing is superb, interesting story line, everything was excellent. The one disappointing factor, I think, is that I sometimes felt I was being preached at. Kingsolver is passionate about the earth, nature, the complex issues surrounding global warming. This book came from her heart, yet I felt sometimes that I was being bonked over the head with the message. But having said that, I learned, so maybe I wasn't being bonked at all!?
Kingsolver handled the dichotomy of the issue so well! Some characters were passionate on one side or the other, others reacted with some skepticism... just like all of us when confronted with scientfic evidence in our own back yards that we may not understand or may not want to analyze too deeply.
All in all, an excellent book... in the end I want to say that I am disappointed in myself for being disappointed. It's a great story and wonderfully written... with that little bit of je ne sais quoi that is giving me pause. Please read it and tell me that you love this book. That will put my mind at ease. I give it 4 stars.
1 comment:
Thank God for copy and paste and Google. Your je ne sais quoi was giving me pause because I didn't know what it meant. I should try this book but I am swamped in titles right now.
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