Prodigal Summer Book

I promise I could make you laugh if I showed you the comments my teachers made in my high school yearbook in my senior year.

From every language arts or creative writing teacher I ever had: The sky's the limit for you, kid!

From every science and math teacher I ever had: Marry rich, kid!

I often wondered what a conversation might have sounded like between the two camps, if they ever collided in the teacher's lounge. Half of them would have been surprised to learn that I was a candidate for a full ride scholarship for writing and the other half would have been surprised to learn that they believed pole dancing would be the highest bar I could ever achieve.

It's not that I don't love Nature; I do. I love it. I trip all over my own two feet staring at it, break into spontaneous poetry writing about it. . . I just don't want to study it. I don't want to know where the luna moth lays her eggs or why. Don't want to glaze over while a botanist explains why the green leaf turns red; I just want to savor the magic that it does, and I want to read Robert Frost aloud when it happens.

So, my first 4 attempts to read Barbara Kingsolver were rough. I kept reading her books and kept feeling disappointed by, well, my reaction of really disliking them. How could I not admire a woman who would dedicate a book to "wildness, where it lives?" How could I not love a writer who has spent her impressive career drawing attention to the damage we are doing to our planet?

I do love Ms. Kingsolver, I do. I love what she represents, love that she fights for our beautiful, natural world. That's why I've given her chance after chance. But, unfortunately, for four consecutive reads, I found her characters about as unrelatable as psychopaths in an asylum in the 1800s.

But. . . even though the protagonists in Prodigal Summer are also unrelatable to me, (lady scientists who think hair brushes are tools for collecting strands of DNA). . . this is the book that FINALLY worked for me.

Prodigal Summer is so stunning. It may be the greatest tribute that a novel has ever paid to a single season (two runners up may be Doctor Zhivago or Ethan Frome for winter) and it is a celebration of. . . well. . . procreation.

Everybody's doing it here, people: the humans, the moths, the coyotes, the snapping turtles, the salamanders, the birds, the flies.

I ruined my copy by taking it, twice, into a cold shower with me.

I never knew that blue-green algae could be so. . . sexy.

Physical pleasure was such a convincing illusion, and sex, the ultimate charade of safety.

I'm finally on board the Barbara bandwagon.

Turns out, she just needed to get dirty.