Flight Behavior

"Unearthly beauty had appeared to her, a vision of glory to stop her in the road."
~Flight Behavior, Barbara Kingsolver

Sometimes, seeing is not believing.

Published in 2012, Flight Behavior by Barbara Kingsolver is the story of Dellarobia Turnbow, a farm wife who lives in Appalachia with her husband, Cub, and their two small children, Cordelia and Preston.  Dellarobia married young--at the age of seventeen--because she got pregnant, which marked the end of her formal education.  One day, as Dellarobia hikes up a mountain to meet someone, she encounters a "forested valley filled with what looks like a lake of fire".  Dazzled by this vision, and not sure what she's seeing, this remarkable sight has a profound affect on Dellarobia, and marks the beginning of an exciting new chapter in her life.

Male Monarch, courtesy of Wikipedia

There is a lot I could say about Flight Behavior--certainly more than I could ever articulate in a short review on my blog.  It's a book about complex subjects, including marriage and family, and the "magic" of science and nature.  Quite simply, though, I relished every page in this exquisite book.  The author has a background in biology, and the science surrounding the monarch butterflies presented in this story, through the work Dr. Ovid Byron and other characters, adds a realistic and fascinating dimension to it.  I learned many things about monarch butterflies in Flight Behavior.  For example, male monarchs have two black spots on their hind wings (click on photo to enlarge).

Flight Behavior is suffused with humanity, humor, and grace.  I love the way that Barbara Kingsolver writes, the way she thinks. She brought me to a place I knew little about, rural Appalachia.  Through her descriptions, I was in the mountains and wet woods, which burst to life through the people, butterflies, and farm animals.  The protagonist, Dellarobia, is real and flawed, but also very likable.    Both sharp and feisty, Dellarobia and her mother-in-law, Hester, are competitive with each other and butt heads quite often.  I wanted Dellarobia to be happier and to reach (at least some of) the potential she forsake when she got married (I also wanted to extinguish her cigarette cravings).  Dellarobia and her husband shop at second-hand shops not because it's fashionable but because that's all they can afford; they're struggling to make ends meet, and have few possessions (they do not even own Christmas tree ornaments).  But Dellarobia's life is rich in a different sense.  She's a dedicated and caring mother, who awakens the budding scientist in her son, Preston (and will hopefully do the same for her daughter, Cordie, when she's a bit older).
 

Female Monarch, courtesy of Wikipedia

Although this beautifully written novel centers around a family, it focuses as well on larger, controversial, and contemporary issues, the impact of global warming and climate change on the environment.  I do think we need to think more about the long-term effects of our choices and actions, and care for the earth today.  Flight Behavior is a thought-provoking book that I enjoyed very much, one that I'll continue to think about for a long time.  Interestingly, while I was reading this novel, my sister-in-law, Kristine, was posting on Facebook about monarch butterflies and her milkweed plants.  I want some of these plants for my own garden--I adore monarchs!

Special thanks to Trish from TLC for sending me this book.  For more reviews, please visit the other stops on TLC's book tour for Flight Behavior.  This was my first book by Barbara Kingsolver, and I'm now very interested in reading The Lacuna, which won the Orange Prize for Fiction, and other works by this no-longer-new-to-me author.

Your comments are welcomed.

Really Random Tuesday #67: Quotes about Books and Reading

The Reader by Fragonard, courtesy of Wikipedia

"The world was hers for the reading.”
 ~Betty Smith

"You could never get a cup of tea large enough or a book long enough to suit me."
~C.S. Lewis

"Books are a uniquely portable magic."
~Stephen King

"I declare after all there is no enjoyment like reading!  How much sooner one tires of any thing than of a book!"
~Jane Austen

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“Many people, myself among them, feel better at the mere sight of a book.”
~Jane Smiley

“Show me a family of readers, and I will show you the people who move the world.”
~Napoleon Bonaparte

“I have often reflected upon the new vistas that reading has opened to me; I knew right there in prison that reading had changed forever the course of my life.  As I see it today, the ability to read awoke inside me some long dormant craving to be mentally alive.”
~Malcolm X

“I am a part of everything that I have read.”
~Theodore Roosevelt

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“Read the best books first, or you may not have a chance to read them at all.”
 ~Henry David Thoreau

“I am reading six books at once, the only way of reading; since, as you will agree, one book is only a single unaccompanied note, and to get the full sound, one needs ten others at the same time."
~Virginia Woolf

“When I look back, I am so impressed again with the life-giving power of literature. If I were a young person today, trying to gain a sense of myself in the world, I would do that again by reading, just as I did when I was young.”
~Maya Angelou

“There is creative reading as well as creative writing.”
~Ralph Waldo Emerson

 ~~~~~~~

“Reading a book is like re-writing it for yourself. You bring to a novel, anything you read, all your experience of the world. You bring your history and you read it in your own terms.”
~Angela Carter

“A good book is an event in my life.”
~Stendhal (Marie-Henri Beyle)

“The reading of all good books is like conversation with the finest men of past centuries.”
~René Descartes

“I intend to put up with nothing that I can put down.”
~Edgar Allan Poe

~~~~~~~

“While we pay lip service to the virtues of reading, the truth is that there is still in our culture something that suspects those who read too much, whatever reading too much means, of being lazy, aimless dreamers, people who need to grow up and come outside to where real life is, who think themselves superior in their separateness.”
 ~Anna Quindlen

“I really had a lot of dreams when I was a kid, and I think a great deal of that grew out of the fact that I had a chance to read a lot.”
~Bill Gates

“Oh! It is absurd to have a hard-and-fast rule about what one should read and what one shouldn't.  More than half of modern culture depends on what one shouldn't read.”
~Oscar Wilde

“All I have learned, I learned from books.”
 ~Abraham Lincoln

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Appearing on random Tuesdays, Really Random Tuesday is a way to post odds and ends--announcements, musings, quotes, photos--any blogging and book-related matters you can think of.  If you have miscellaneous book news to gather up and are inspired by this idea, "grab" the button for use on your own blog, then add your link to the "master" Mister Linky on the Really Random Tuesday page. 

I hope you've enjoyed these quotes about reading and books. Your comments are welcomed.  If you have a favorite quote about books or reading, please feel free to include it in your comment.  Thanks for reading!