Another author I greatly admire is Barbara Kingsolver. She writes fiction, nonfiction, essays, and even poetry. She is also a biologist (like me) and environmental issues often feature in her work. I’ve read nearly everything she has written. This book, though, is my favorite and I reread it recently.

There are two parallel stories. One is about a young woman married to her husband’s family and farm. The other is about a middle-aged woman married to a mountain. Woven in between is a third story about two neighbors, a man and a woman, both elderly and widowed, who can’t see eye-to-eye on anything.

Lusa left academia behind in Lexington to marry Cole, a farmer in Tennessee. She loves the farm, but finds his family’s ways contradict her environmental ethic. She feels her sisters-in-law judge her harshly. She doesn’t fit in. Even Cole sometimes seems like one of the enemy.

Deanna also left a life in education to become a resident game warden on the mountain she grew up near. For two years, she has spent most of her time alone in a rough cabin in the woods, with only the wildlife for company—until a young man suddenly wanders into her life…and stays.

The cabin was no place to be if you craved long days and sunlight, but there was no better dawn chorus anywhere on earth. In the high season of courtship and mating, this music was like the earth itself opening its mouth to sing.

Garnett is spending his retirement years breeding chestnut seedlings, hoping to create a blight-resistant revival of the American chestnut. This is God’s plan for him, he knows. There are right and wrong ways of doing things, which include the proper roles for men and women, and the proper way to manage a farm (with herbicides and pesticides, of course).

His neighbor, Nannie, has a very successful organic orchard. Her ways of doing things run counter to everything Garnett believes in. Kingsolver’s character’s are complex and not predictable. Well, okay, Garnett is more caricature than character; I’m sure I’ve met this guy somewhere. But his inner dialogue is priceless.

Because of Kingsolver’s biology background, I learned several things, including: what happens when a phoebe is scared off her nest at night; why pesticides (and coyote hunts) result in a larger population of the targeted pests; and why common cockleburs have become a nationwide weed problem.

This book is about finding our place in the world and among family and neighbors. It also strives to teach us that our differences can be complimentary rather than contradictory. We depend on each other more than we sometimes care to realize. When we do realize, we all win.

Kingsolver is known for bittersweet endings that give you the feel-goods. Prodigal Summer does not disappoint in this regard.