Characters are saving grace of `Prodigal Summer'

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"Prodigal Summer"

by Barbara Kingsolver

HarperCollins, $26

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We first meet 40ish wildlife biologist Deanna Wolfe on the forest trail in southern Appalachia, where she inhabits an isolated cabin in the mountains as a forest ranger. Deanna is tracking some elusive coyotes, hoping they may be re-establishing a habitat in her woods. But something else is tracking Deanna: Eddie Bondo, a much younger hunter who might be looking for the same coyotes - hoping to exterminate them, not to preserve them.

Gradually, as Barbara Kingsolver develops the narrative in her new book "Prodigal Summer," Deanna's story melds with two others. Lusa Maluf Landowski, an entomologist married to a young farmer who lives just beyond Deanna's mountains, is wondering if she'll ever fit in with her forbidding in-laws and how the family farm will survive when catastrophe strikes.

And two nearby neighbors, the elderly and cranky Garnett and Nannie, are escalating their long-standing feud, because Garnett wants the county spray truck to eliminate the pests on his property, but Nannie puts up a "no spray zone" sign because she is growing certified organic apples and produce. We know that Garnett is really an old eco-softie, however, because he is trying to regrow a historical strain of chestnut trees that were almost obliterated by a blight.

If you are sensing that all three stories have a common theme, you're on target: Kingsolver probes not only human relations here, but also a strong ecological subtext that is at the heart of all the human interactions. This is where "Prodigal Summer" gets a bit heavy-handed. Kingsolver's characters are always musing on complex issues of predators, prey, pesticides, extinction and vegetarianism.

During her chats with Eddie, Deanna is not just admiring the fit of his Levis; she is pondering such issues as "the chemicals on grain and cotton killed far more butterflies and bees and bluebirds and whippoorwills than the mortal cost of a steak or a leather jacket. Just clearing the land to grow soybeans and corn had killed about everything on half of the world. Every cup of coffee equaled one dead songbird in the jungle somewhere, she'd read."

By now, you are probably consumed with guilt over all those cups of Starbucks and dead songbirds, but fortunately, Kingsolver has more to offer in this novel than a massive load of ecological awareness.

What saves "Prodigal Summer" is literally strength of character; these are complex, sometimes contradictory, people who live with real passion and who connect with each other in surprising ways. Angst-ridden teens, younger children of a desperately ill mother, an old duffer who mistakes a neighbor's scarecrow for a visitor, and the young wife who remembers her unfriendly sisters-in-law with mnemonic devices (Mary Edna is "Menacing Eldest") all are sharply and deftly drawn, and they give this novel its power and its charm.

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Author appearance

Barbara Kingsolver will appear at 7:30 p.m. Friday in Bellingham at the Mount Baker Theater, 104 N. Commercial Ave. in Bellingham at a benefit for the North Cascades Institute. Sponsored by the Raincoast Booksellers League. Information: 800-392-2665.