Book: Flight Behavior by Barbara Kingsolver

I have always liked Barbara Kingsolver's writings and this book didn't change my mind. I decided when I finished it that I like 90%, maybe 95%. 

There are two main threads running through the novel. One is climate warming; the other is life in Appalachia when money and opportunities are scarce. 

The heroine is Dellarobia Turnbow. She has two small children, a kind, stolid husband who works whenever he can but for low wages. Money is always scarce, and they live in a precarious financial condition, making do, with money and bills never not a concern. Dellarobia does smoke and her husband, Cub, does grab a McDonald's meal occasionally while working, but they both feel guilty about spending money for these small pleasures; Dellarobia is always trying to quit smoking.  

So one day Monarch butterflies stop in their Tennessee valley instead of moving on down to Mexico. Millions of Monarchs hanging from the trees in huge clusters, filling the skies. It is a phenomenon that changes Dellarobia's life.

The writing is rich with details of lives spent just getting through a day, a week, a season. But people persevere, as her community and her in-laws have done for decades, and there is a social fabric that sustains them, with neighbors, church, farming, extended families, the lack of options accepted. 

A team of scientists comes to study the Monarchs. There are some absolutely lovely passages about Dellarobia's small son and his curiosity about and interaction with these people, their methods and equipment and their general willingness to give back to Dellarobia and her family when she facilitates their endeavor.

There are vignettes of sheep raising, of weather, of a second-hand store in the next town, of Dellarobia's kids, her husband, her mother-in-law. There is the real possibility their land will be logged; there are the protestors and workers who come and get involved, or just come to see the spectacle of the butterflies. 

Through it all, Dellarobia is real, honest, conflicted...and this is what Kingsolver does so well: describe what must be her neighbors and their lives since she also lives in southern Appalachia. I thought that was worth reading the book even without the global warming part. She is at times critical in general (of local educational resources for instance) but sympathetic in particular, showing how difficult it is for people with few available jobs and second-rate schools to make significant changes. It is definitely a social study. 

So how to make global warming also real? how to change minds? how to present the irrefutable science that the earth is changing, with implications for all of us? and convince people to accept this? In this regard, Beautiful Flight tries, although, truthfully, it remains an ephemeral concept for most of Dellarobia's social network in her tiny town of Feathertown, just like the butterflies.

Ambitious, like An Inconvenient Truth.....