Volume 3, Issue 12
June 7 - June 21, 2001

Book Reviews

PRODIGAL SUMMER

Until recently, I never looked at a moth and thought about sex. I never stared long and hard at the slimey-sick body of a caterpillar and dreamt about love. Bugs are icky and the inner workings of their lifecycles don't turn me on. Or at least that's what I thought before I read Barbara Kingsolver's Prodigal Summer.

I have to admit I didn't really want to read this book (but it was a birthday present, so I had to). It's all about nature and biologists and trees and flowers and bugs. Yes, lots of bugs. But when I looked at insects through the eyes of Kingsolver's characters, bugs weren't just something to squish with my sneaker. They were voluptuous, elegant, beautiful, and yes, even sexy.

Before you get me a subscription to an insect fetish magazine (cockroaches in high heels, spiders in thongs, etc.) let me explain. Deanna Wolfe is a wildlife biologist living alone on a mountain. She's obsessed with nature to the exclusion of anything else. In fact, she hasn't actually had any real human contact in years. Her life consists of keeping track of how many mushrooms grow in a meadow, how many babies a mother coyote is raising, what color the leaves are when they fall off a tree. Sound boring? Not at all.

Deanna sees life (though not human life) all around her. And as summer approaches, she can't help but notice that everything (from the wildflowers to the squirrels to the moths) is breeding. The whole world is having sex, but Deanna doesn't crave physical contact. Being in the middle of the natural world bursting with the forces of procreation is enough for her until a young hiker half her age wanders up the mountain.

Eddie Bondo is also a loner, a wanderer who has been sleeping in a tent in the woods for months. When these two meet (neither one having had a conversation with another human in ages) they are surprised that the same natural forces that pull male and female moths, birds, and coyotes together are also at work in their human hearts. For the first time, Eddie and Deanna see that lust and desire aren't just animal cravings, but that they too are part of the cycles of the natural world.

Prodigal Summer isn't exactly a romantic book. It's sexy, but not in a cheesy Harlequin or Playboy let-me-sit-in-the-bathroom- with-my-right-hand kind of way. The way Kingsolver writes sex is exciting, titillating, and above all, natural. The squirrels do it, the bugs do it, the people do it. Everybody is doing it-- especially since it's summer.

--Cecilia Johnson