"Hope in all its versions went out of stock, including the crummy discount brands," Dellarobia Turnbow thinks as she hikes up the Tennessee mountain behind her ranch house one autumn day, "and the heart had just one instruction left: run." What happens next, in Barbara Kingsolver's eighth novel, Flight Behavior, alters Dellarobia's life, with ripples extending far beyond the valley.
Like Dellarobia, fleeing into the unknown, thousands of monarch butterflies hang from the trees, a spectacle like "a lake of fire" foreign to this hardscrabble sheep farm. She takes it as a sign and hurries home, awed by her discovery--but soon learns about her father-in-law's agreement with a logging company to clear-cut the mountain. News of the butterfly influx spreads, drawing an entomologist from New Mexico who invites Dellarobia to help research the phenomenon and encourages her intellect, suppressed since her hasty marriage to Cub at 17.
Wintering butterflies are just one oddity this year; it rained all summer and December feels like "the season of burst and leaky clouds." Climate change is the newest in a lifetime of struggles for these Appalachian folks, and Kingsolver brings them vividly to life: upbeat best friend Dovey, with her texted church signs ("Get right or get left!"); hapless Cub, still obeying his domineering parents; Bobby, the charismatic "no-hell" young preacher; and especially Dellarobia, smart and good-humored, loving and determined, who eventually charts a new flight plan of her own. --Cheryl Krocker McKeon, bookseller