Prodigal Summer by Barbara Kingsolver is about nature. The reader will learn about animals, flowers, and people. Her characters teach us about each of these subjects. Deanna is a natural biologist, working and living in the Appalachian woods. She spots coyotes, who are not native to the area and hopes to protect them. She meets Ed, a traveling hunter who hunts coyotes, specifically. They become a couple and learn much about each other's psyches.
Next, we meet Lusa, an environmentalist who has inherited, much to her deceased husband's sisters' dismay, a tobacco farm. How she copes is a good story.
Lastly, we have two old neighbors who are fighting over insecticide. One uses it and the other claims it destroys her crops.
Maybe because I'm not that interested in nature and crops, but I found the story too discursive and preachy, regarding conservation of flora and fauna. I thought the characters rather unbelievable. Deana is old enough to be Ed's mother, yet she acts like a randy teenager. Plus, she gets pregnant and purposely doesn't tell Ed.
The other characters are tied together nicely in the end. Everybody lives happily ever after.
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