Curious about how such a beautiful event could be a bad sign, Dellarobia (who had planned to go to college before getting pregnant at 17) starts working for the researcher and his graduate students.
Then Ovid Byron, an entomologist who has studied the monarchs for years, arrives with a different explanation: the butterflies are wintering in Tennessee instead of their usual zone in Mexico because climate change is altering their range.īyron sets up a makeshift lab on Dellarobia’s farm. Locals see their arrival as a religious miracle (and, maybe, a warning against plans to clear-cut the hills).
But when she walks up into the woods behind her house for a rendezvous, she sees what appears to be a miracle: a valley glowing orange, seemingly dipped in flames, looking “like the inside of joy.”Īs it turns out, the vision is masses of monarch butterflies that have shifted from their usual migration path. The book is the story of Dellarobia Turnbow, a young wife and mother in rural Tennessee who is bored and stifled caring for two small children on her family farm. Flight Behavior is set in the present, not in a post-apocalyptic future, and climate shifts are not manifested by thousand-year storms or collapsing icebergs. Kingsolver frames the story differently from most other novelists who have written about climate change. There’s a healthy dose of science, but ultimately the book is about faith and what people choose to believe.
Remember Michael Crichton’s 2005 techno-thriller novel State of Fear, which featured eco-terrorists creating artificial disasters to convince people that climate change is real? Flight Behavior, the eighth novel by award-winning writer Barbara Kingsolver, is an antidote - a vivid, but non-sensational story about climate change.
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