He'd been promised a diminutive, smart, and fiery-haired beauty, not unlike Dellarobia Turnbow, the novel's main character.

Would his sister Randi, for example, a libertarian, be any more inclined to support regulation of carbon emissions after reading the novel? Would her teenage son learn anything about ecology in the unlikely event that he picked up the book, too?Īlan's musings were interrupted by the urgent trill of his phone alarm, a reminder to get going for a blind date to which he'd reluctantly agreed weeks before after his friends complained that being a quantitative analyst made him disinclined to take personal risks. He'd enjoyed the book, and marveled at Kingsolver's intricate interweaving of multiple threads - scientific content and commentary materializing as characters unraveled and new patterns emerged.īut he couldn't help wondering whether fiction could really be a tool for persuasion, or for scientific learning of any kind.

Some didn't think Kingsolver had pulled it off, describing the ecological backstory as ' mildly unconvincing,' complaining that the characters often sounded ' more like spokespersons than flesh and blood human beings.' But many, while noting the challenge of engaging with urgent social issues, were generally positive, and Alan was as well. The novel itself was also caught between two worlds: was it a vehicle for scientific facts and environmental persuasion, or plain old literary fiction, a straightforward addition to Kingsolver's fictional oeuvre? Could it be both? And were there really displaced Monarch butterflies in Tennessee? It was an engrossing read that left him caught between the thawing Appalachian winter he'd just left behind and the artificial warmth of his Manhattan apartment, mercifully spared by Superstorm Sandy. He'd just finished reading Flight Behavior, Barbara Kingsolver's latest novel of love, loss and climate change, the story of a young woman's derailed ambitions and the millions of monarch butterflies that found themselves on her in-laws' struggling Tennessee farm, their typical winter migration disrupted by a warming planet.

A Monarch butterfly (Danaus plexippus) in Costa RicaĪlan turned off his Kindle, slightly nostalgic for the satisfying slap of a hardcover firmly closed and stowed as a souvenir of some imagined world.

Barbara kingsolver monarchs