Book Review: Flight Behavior by Barbara Kingsolver

Title: Flight Behavior
Author: Barbara Kingsolver
Enjoyment Rating: ***
Source: Kindle for iPad
This book would be rated: PG or PG-13

 There's nothing I like better in a novel than a complicated character. If it's a young, complicated, female whose character unfolds gradually, as the reader gets to know her, even better. And in that respect, I loved Flight Behavior. Dellarobia Turnbow is a twenty-eight year-old mother of two, married to her shotgun groom for nearly a dozen years, and about to throw it all away for the cute telephone guy who has agreed to meet her in the deer blind above her East Tennessee farm one November morning. And then she sees the butterflies-- millions of monarchs, whose traditional winter home in Mexico was destroyed in a landslide, and who have lost their way.

Suddenly, nothing in Dellarobia's life is the same. She's lived in the same town her whole life, and put up with a marriage to a good man who is a bad fit for her, but once people start coming to see the butterflies and get interested in Dellarobia's story, she starts to see herself differently. In the beginning, I saw a young girl who smoked around her kids, fought with her mother-in-law, did her Christmas shopping at the dollar store, and probably spoke in an accent as thick the groundcover of butterflies. But over the course of the novel, Dellarobia's transformation is as inevitable as that of the butterflies she grows to both love and fear.

But on the other hand, one of the things I hate most in novels is when they're didactic. And when Kingsolver isn't doing great things with Dellarobia's character, she's spending page after page preaching to her audience about the perils of global warming. I'm not one of the global warming naysayers, but even still, I don't like preaching in my fiction. At times, the pages of "instruction" almost made me put the novel down. And if I had, it would have been a shame, because Dellarobia is really one of the great characters of contemporary fiction.