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FLIGHT BEHAVIOR

by Barbara Kingsolver ‧ RELEASE DATE: Nov. 6, 2012

One of Kingsolver’s better efforts at preaching her politics and pulling heartstrings at the same time.

A young woman discovers her rural Tennessee community has been invaded by monarch butterflies in this effective tear-jerker cum environmental jeremiad from Kingsolver ( The Lacuna , 2009, etc.).

At 17, English honor student Dellarobia thought she would escape a future of grim rural poverty by attending college. Instead, she got pregnant and married. Now 27, feeling stifled by the responsibility of two young children she loves and a husband she tolerates, Dellarobia is heading to her first adulterous tryst when she happens upon a forested valley taken over by a host of brilliant orange butterflies that appear at first like a silent fire. She skips the tryst, but her life changes in unexpected ways. Soon after, Dellarobia leads her sweet if dim husband, Cub, to the butterflies, and they become public knowledge. The butterflies have landed in Tennessee because their usual winter habitat in Mexico has been flooded out. The local church congregation, including Dellarobia’s mother-in-law, Hester, embraces the butterflies’ arrival as a sign of grace. Influenced by her beloved preacher, usually antagonistic Hester (a refreshingly complex character) becomes a surprising ally in convincing Dellarobia’s father-in-law not to cut down the forest for much-needed cash, although she is not above charging tourists, who arrive in increasing numbers to view the spectacle. Soon, a handsome black scientist with a Caribbean accent has set up in her barn to study the beautiful phenomena, which he says may spell environmental doom. Dellarobia is attracted to the sophisticated, educated world Dr. Byron and his grad school assistants represent. When she takes a job working with the scientists, the schisms in her already troubled marriage deepen. Yet, she is fiercely defensive against signs of condescension toward her family and neighbors; she really goes after a guy whose list of ways to lower the carbon footprint—“bring your own Tupperware to a restaurant,” “fly less”—have no relevance to people trying to survive economically day-by-day.

Pub Date: Nov. 6, 2012

ISBN: 978-0-06-212426-5

Page Count: 448

Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins

Review Posted Online: Sept. 1, 2012

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2012

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by Barbara Kingsolver

HOUSE OF LEAVES

by Mark Z. Danielewski ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 6, 2000

The story's very ambiguity steadily feeds its mysteriousness and power, and Danielewski's mastery of postmodernist and...

An amazingly intricate and ambitious first novel - ten years in the making - that puts an engrossing new spin on the traditional haunted-house tale.

Texts within texts, preceded by intriguing introductory material and followed by 150 pages of appendices and related "documents" and photographs, tell the story of a mysterious old house in a Virginia suburb inhabited by esteemed photographer-filmmaker Will Navidson, his companion Karen Green (an ex-fashion model), and their young children Daisy and Chad.  The record of their experiences therein is preserved in Will's film The Davidson Record - which is the subject of an unpublished manuscript left behind by a (possibly insane) old man, Frank Zampano - which falls into the possession of Johnny Truant, a drifter who has survived an abusive childhood and the perverse possessiveness of his mad mother (who is institutionalized).  As Johnny reads Zampano's manuscript, he adds his own (autobiographical) annotations to the scholarly ones that already adorn and clutter the text (a trick perhaps influenced by David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest ) - and begins experiencing panic attacks and episodes of disorientation that echo with ominous precision the content of Davidson's film (their house's interior proves, "impossibly," to be larger than its exterior; previously unnoticed doors and corridors extend inward inexplicably, and swallow up or traumatize all who dare to "explore" their recesses).  Danielewski skillfully manipulates the reader's expectations and fears, employing ingeniously skewed typography, and throwing out hints that the house's apparent malevolence may be related to the history of the Jamestown colony, or to Davidson's Pulitzer Prize-winning photograph of a dying Vietnamese child stalked by a waiting vulture.  Or, as "some critics [have suggested,] the house's mutations reflect the psychology of anyone who enters it."

Pub Date: March 6, 2000

ISBN: 0-375-70376-4

Page Count: 704

Publisher: Pantheon

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2000

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by Mark Z. Danielewski

THE SECRET HISTORY

by Donna Tartt ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 16, 1992

The Brat Pack meets The Bacchae in this precious, way-too-long, and utterly unsuspenseful town-and-gown murder tale. A bunch of ever-so-mandarin college kids in a small Vermont school are the eager epigones of an aloof classics professor, and in their exclusivity and snobbishness and eagerness to please their teacher, they are moved to try to enact Dionysian frenzies in the woods. During the only one that actually comes off, a local farmer happens upon them—and they kill him. But the death isn't ruled a murder—and might never have been if one of the gang—a cadging sybarite named Bunny Corcoran—hadn't shown signs of cracking under the secret's weight. And so he too is dispatched. The narrator, a blank-slate Californian named Richard Pepen chronicles the coverup. But if you're thinking remorse-drama, conscience masque, or even semi-trashy who'll-break-first? page-turner, forget it: This is a straight gee-whiz, first-to-have-ever-noticed college novel—"Hampden College, as a body, was always strangely prone to hysteria. Whether from isolation, malice, or simple boredom, people there were far more credulous and excitable than educated people are generally thought to be, and this hermetic, overheated atmosphere made it a thriving black petri dish of melodrama and distortion." First-novelist Tartt goes muzzy when she has to describe human confrontations (the murder, or sex, or even the ping-ponging of fear), and is much more comfortable in transcribing aimless dorm-room paranoia or the TV shows that the malefactors anesthetize themselves with as fate ticks down. By telegraphing the murders, Tartt wants us to be continually horrified at these kids—while inviting us to semi-enjoy their manneristic fetishes and refined tastes. This ersatz-Fitzgerald mix of moralizing and mirror-looking (Jay McInerney shook and poured the shaker first) is very 80's—and in Tartt's strenuous version already seems dated, formulaic. Les Nerds du Mal—and about as deep (if not nearly as involving) as a TV movie.

Pub Date: Sept. 16, 1992

ISBN: 1400031702

Page Count: 592

Publisher: Knopf

Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1992

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Flight Behaviour by Barbara Kingsolver – review

C limate change: the spectre hanging over every child, is the single most urgent issue of our times – and a challenge to any novelist. But how to write fiction about the Earth's storm-filled future without a whiff of the pulpit?

Barbara Kingsolver's paradoxical solution is to set her story on a sheep farm in the depressed Bible Belt. By recruiting traditional images of Heaven, Hell and sacrificial lambs to convey the impact of climate change on a community, an ecosystem and a species, the repercussions of man-made disaster lie firmly where they belong: in moral territory.

Kingsolver has been building up to this. In The Poisonwood Bible , in which a Christian missionary sacrifices his family to his own zealotry in the Belgian Congo, her preoccupation is as much with self-delusion as it is with doctrine. In Flight Behaviour , successor to the Orange prize-winning The Lacuna , she expands on the theme of deaf ears, blind eyes and belief-versus-evidence with the trademark human sympathy that has won her the devotion of readers worldwide.

Trapped in a loveless shotgun marriage and mother to two young children, the sharp-witted Dellarobia Turnbow is planning to bolt from her lummox of a husband Cub, when she stumbles on an inexplicable vision on a mountainside slated for logging: a lake of orange fire. The phenomenon turns out to be a vast flock of monarch butterflies, whose disrupted migration pattern has catapulted them wildly off course.

As their "discoverer", Dellarobia achieves unasked-for internet fame, but it's the arrival of a team of entomologists led by Ovid Byron – African American, and from a parallel universe of education and plenty – that delivers the life change she has craved. She is also smitten: "Every day she rose and rose to the occasion of this man." Hired as part of Ovid's team, Dellarobia gives up smoking and learns to identify and assess butterfly behaviour. In the process, she metamorphoses into the family breadwinner but becomes humiliatingly aware of the limited scope of the only world she has known.

The God-fearing, moral-majority community of Featherstone can't avoid being affected by the disrupted seasons, and refers to the current endless rainfall as "water torture". But their thought-patterns are entrenched: while weather is God's department, climate change is something people – Dellarobia included – "knew to be wary of". Slowly, alongside her serious five-year-old son Preston, Dellarobia learns that the unexpected and aberrant arrival of the butterflies is a signpost on the road to environmental hell.

"How could this be true, she thought, if no one was talking about it? People with influence. Important people made such a big deal over infinitely smaller losses." When she asks Ovid, "Is there some part of this I can actually see?" his reply devastates her. "'Your children's adulthood?' That nearly floored her of course … How dare he belt her with that one?"

The precarious paradise of the mountainside, Dellarobia realises, will be lost to her son and daughter. But there's no Tree of Knowledge involved. On the contrary, temptation is the comfort of ignorance. This comes in the form of the omnipresent feelgood news story, borne here by a door-stepping TV journalist hellbent on presenting the monarchs as a "miracle" rather than a symptom of environmental imbalance. When Ovid Byron loses his scientific cool on camera and the encounter goes triumphantly viral, Kingsolver's evocation of TV's contempt for its audiences also includes the observation that scientists are too hamstrung by their own objectivity to transmit their message effectively. As Ovid comments, with bitterness: "As long as we won't commit to knowing everything, the presumption is we know nothing."

Kingsolver has a sharp eye, too, for the unwitting condescension of the eco-campaigners who set up camp on the mountain. When Dellarobia is asked to sign an energy-saving pledge, she is baffled by its demands. Like anyone else hanging on by a thread, she has no need for advice on not leaving her computer on standby, cutting down on red meat, rationing her fuel use, saving electricity, buying recycled clothes and "flying less". She has never owned a computer or boarded a plane. In fact, nothing on the list applies to her: poverty has seen to that.

Dellarobia's journey from caterpillar to butterfly reaches a painful culmination in her clear-eyed refusal to lie to Preston about what the future holds for him, both in a collapsing family unit and in the wider world. "Her powerful inclination was to make up a better-days-ahead story. Nobody ever thought kids wanted the truth. And right on from there it went: the never-ending story."

Towards the close of the novel, Dellarobia finds a lamb in the snow, born unseasonably early. The only way to revive it is to swing it around by the hind legs, to kickstart the lungs and decongest the airways. With Cub's help, she saves its life. But the manoeuvre is traumatic for them both. Only a shocking, harrowing solution – a paradigm shift of radical proportions – will offer any future to the newborn, the novel seems to be saying. It's a harsh but vital message.

Kingsolver's masterly evocation of an age – ours, here, now – stumbling wilfully blind towards the abyss is an elegy not just for the endangered monarch butterfly, but for the ambitious, flawed species that conjured the mass extinction of which its loss is a part. Urgent issues demand important art. Flight Behaviour rises – with conscience and majesty – to the occasion of its time.

Liz Jensen's The Uninvited is published by Bloomsbury.

• Barbara Kingsolver

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Book Review: Flight Behavior by Barbara Kingsolver

Barbara Kingsolver’s Flight Behavior does all that a great work of eco-fiction should, addressing the issues (climate change) without sacrificing the story (a woman whose small-town world is broken wide open by a mysterious act of nature).

Dellarobia Turnbow, married at seventeen due to a pregnancy in which she lost the baby, is a decade later still married, tied to her two young children and husband’s family farm. She escapes emotionally through wild crushes on various men—and one day, planning to go through with an affair, she heads into the mountains for the rendezvous, only to find a “lake of fire” awaiting her. The sight of it, blurred because she’d left her glasses behind, brings her back to reality and she returns home, determined to accept her life as it is. Then, when she learns of her in-laws’ plans to log the forest from which she’s just returned, she tells her husband, “They can’t log that mountain.” When pressed for a reason, she can say only, “The world can surprise you…It could be something special up there.”

That “something special” turns out to be a vast population of monarch butterflies, whose arrival, to the locals, signifies a miracle of God; to the scientific community, it’s a sign of ecological disaster.

Soon Dellarobia’s Southern Appalachian town is filled with visitors—scientists and activists, the media and the curious. Dellarobia, who has been living restlessly in a home built by her in-laws while she raises her kids and her husband works the farm, becomes drawn into the wider world of the monarchs and the global implications for their sudden and unexplained arrival in her town.

While Dellarobia, smart and intellectually curious despite a limited education, is disturbed by the fate of the butterflies and what their detour means for the ecosystem, for most of the people in her town, “weather is the Lord’s business,” and denial reigns, as does the need for survival—like the promise of logging money “‘when there’s trees standing that could be trees laying down,’” as Dellarobia’s father-in-law says.

Dellarobia is the first among them to realize that what is happening is bigger than all of them. “Man against Nature. Of all the possible conflicts, that was the one that was hopeless. Even a slim education had taught her this much: Man loses.”

Yet paying attention to climate change is a luxury for the local population, as Dellarobia herself sees when an environmental activist reads from a pledge to lower one’s carbon footprint. Among the items on the list are bringing Tupperware to restaurants for leftovers (“I’ve not eaten in a restaurant in over two years,” Dellarobia says), carrying a bottle of tap water instead of buying bottled water (“Our well water is good. We wouldn’t pay for store-bought.”), eating less red meat (Dellarobia’s family practically lives on mac and cheese), and shopping at secondhand stores (the only stories at which Dellarobia can afford to shop).

Dellabrobia feels keenly the differences between her own life and that of the researchers, students about her own age who have no children, who “had ridden airplanes, moved among foreigners, walked on the ground of other countries. Dellarobia had been nowhere…she couldn’t even muster the strength for jealousy, given the size it would have to take.” While she recognizes that their presence is environmentally tragic, she also knows that what’s happening is presenting her with an opportunity, not only for herself but for her bright young son and her baby daughter.

As winter looms and the study of butterflies on the mountain continues, Dellarobia becomes more involved in the research, harboring feelings for the lead scientist while seeing her own family and her own future through new eyes. Using both page-turning tension and great empathy, Kingsolver portrays not only the implications of a changing planet but the reverberations of personal change upon an entire family, creating an unforgettable story.

Midge Raymond is a co-founder of Ashland Creek Press. She is the author of the novel My Last Continent and the award-winning short story collection Forgetting English . Her suspense novel, Devils Island , co-authored with John Yunker, is forthcoming from Oceanview Publishing in 2024, and her novel Floreana is forthcoming from Little A in 2025.

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Flight Behavior - review - Barbara Kingsolver

At the beginning of Barbara Kingsolver’s new novel, Flight Behavior , a bored young woman wants to torpedo her life. Twenty-eight-year-old Dellarobia leaves her two kids with her mother-in-law and marches through the backwoods of their struggling Southern Appalachian farm to spend an illicit afternoon with the young, dumb telephone man. But before she can fling herself into chaos, she stumbles upon a scene of transcendent glory: a valley aflame with monarch butterflies, their overlapping wings creating a rippling wave of beacon and promise. Her parish embraces the butterflies as a sign of their small town’s providence. Television reporters smell a cheap feel-good story. Hipster college kids discover a cause. The few worried scientists who camp out behind Dellarobia’s house fear doom. Everybody has an agenda, and Dellarobia, whose narrow existence up until now has been defined by a positive pregnancy test at the age of 17, must reclaim her place in an exploded world.

Kingsolver sometimes undercuts her own grace as a storyteller by filling her characters’ mouths with clunky polemics about, say, global warming or the class system. Those moments seem inorganic in a story that is otherwise so alive with tension and possibility. But the novel really soars in the exquisitely drawn scenes where a strapped woman feels claustrophobic in a dollar store or panicked during a job interview or wistful for her bright young son’s future. Dellarobia is a smart, fierce, messy woman, and one can’t help rooting for her to find her wings. B

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Flight Behavior (Kingsolver)

Flight Behavior Barbara Kingsolver, 2012 HarperCollins 464 pp. ISBN-13: 9780062124272 Summary Flight Behavior transfixes from its opening scene, when a young woman's narrow experience of life is thrown wide with the force of a raging fire. In the lyrical language of her native Appalachia, Barbara Kingsolver bares the rich, tarnished humanity of her novel's inhabitants and unearths the modern complexities of rural existence. Characters and reader alike are quickly carried beyond familiar territory here, into the unsettled ground of science, faith, and everyday truces between reason and conviction. Dellarobia Turnbow is a restless farm wife who gave up her own plans when she accidentally became pregnant at seventeen. Now, after a decade of domestic disharmony on a failing farm, she has settled for permanent disappointment but seeks momentary escape through an obsessive flirtation with a younger man. As she hikes up a mountain road behind her house to a secret tryst, she encounters a shocking sight: a silent, forested valley filled with what looks like a lake of fire. She can only understand it as a cautionary miracle, but it sparks a raft of other explanations from scientists, religious leaders, and the media. The bewildering emergency draws rural farmers into unexpected acquaintance with urbane journalists, opportunists, sightseers, and a striking biologist with his own stake in the outcome. As the community lines up to judge the woman and her miracle, Dellarobia confronts her family, her church, her town, and a larger world, in a flight toward truth that could undo all she has ever believed. Flight Behavior takes on one of the most contentious subjects of our time: climate change. With a deft and versatile empathy Kingsolver dissects the motives that drive denial and belief in a precarious world.  ( From the publisher .)

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Flight Behavior by Barbara Kingsolver

• Publication Date: June 4, 2013
• Genres: Fiction
• Paperback: 464 pages
• Publisher: Harper Perennial
• ISBN-10: 0062124277
• ISBN-13: 9780062124272
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Book Review: Flight Behavior by Barbara Kingsolver

Flight Behavior by Barbara Kingsolver is a quiet, subtle kind of novel that worms its way under your skin before you know it. It follows a young mother, Dellarobia, who is coming to the realization that the dreams she had for her future are drifting further and further from her reach as she raises her two children as a quite reluctant stay-at-home mother. As she goes off one day for a tryst with a man she met in town, she is instead confronted by millions of monarch butterflies that seem to have settled down right in her rural Tennessee backyard.

Flight Behavior is a challenge to anyone who has ever said “I’ll never understand that” or “they could never understand” in a way that diminishes your loyalty to party lines in favor of connecting with people on a more intimate level through love for the world we live in, commitment to improving our communities, and hope for the future.

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Book Reviews

Giving wing to a story of climate change.

Brian Kimberling

Flight Behavior

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The mercury hit 100 for ten consecutive days in some places last summer, and the drought of 2012 may be a preview of what climate change will bring: amber waves of extremely short corn. In Barbara Kingsolver's seventh novel Flight Behavior , climate change delivers antithetical weather to eastern Tennessee — such that "the neighbors' tomato crop had melted to liquid stench on the vine under the summer's nonstop rains, and their orchard grew a gray, fungal caul that was smothering the fruit and trees together." The novel is set in a year in the near future in which " the very snapping turtles had dragged themselves from silted ponds and roamed the soggy land looking for higher ground." That verb "roam" tempted this reader to picture the turtles on horseback, but that is a minor infelicity in a novel of great scope.

The book's central premise is that millions of monarch butterflies appear on a mountainside in eastern Tennessee. They have been displaced from their historic wintering site in Mexico by environmental degradation and climate change. But they are unlikely to survive Appalachian snow — catastrophic population loss is certain, and extinction likely. Tourists, entomologists, and activists congregate nearby.

Barbara Kingsolver's previous books include The Poisonwood Bible and The Lacuna. David Wood hide caption

Barbara Kingsolver's previous books include The Poisonwood Bible and The Lacuna.

The butterflies are discovered by a married mother-of-two named Dellarobia Turnbow, who is en route to a tryst with a young man. She is not fully aware at the beginning of the book why she is so dissatisfied with her marriage; she is simply ready to wreck it. The butterflies disrupt her plans, and subsequently she mingles with well-heeled butterfly newcomers , navigates the established treacheries of Feathertown, and tentatively probes the reasons for her own discontent . Dellarobia's domestic gloom and gradual enlightenment make a beguiling tale, with some exquisite set pieces such as a marital meltdown in the dollar store , and the sublimely subversive idea of decorating a Christmas tree with money.

The butterflies, on the other hand, like the unrelenting summer rain, do not quite square with life as we know it now. Terrible things are happening ecologically in this new drought-addled world. Forty-one percent of amphibians are currently facing extinction, Sudden oak death is devastating whole ecosystems, and nobody is sure why bee colonies keep suddenly collapsing. Monarch butterflies have symbolic sentimental value as emblems of fragile beauty, but they also make Flight Behavior somewhat speculative, hypothetical – with a suggestion that ecological catastrophe is still around the corner somewhere. Fiction needn't subscribe to a hierarchy of urgency, but this book does, and the butterflies are mildly unconvincing.

Flight Behavior will be published on Election Day after a presidential campaign in which climate change was noticeably absent. In this and throughout the book, Kingsolver is deft with a pointed hint.

Brian Kimberling is the author of Snapper.

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Flight Behavior: A Novel

Barbara Kingsolver returns to native ground in her fourteenth book,  Flight Behavior . The novel is a heady exploration of climate change, along with media exploitation and political opportunism that lie at the root of what may be our most urgent modern dilemma. Set in Appalachia, a region to which Kingsolver has returned often in both her acclaimed fiction and nonfiction, its suspenseful narrative traces the unforeseen impact of global concerns on the ordinary citizens of a rural community. As environmental, economic, and political issues converge, the residents of Feathertown, Tennessee, are forced to come to terms with their changing place in the larger world.

Dellarobia Turnbow, the engaging central character who sets things in motion, is ready for a change of any kind. A mother of young children, trapped in claustrophobic rural poverty, Dellarobia long ago repressed any ambitions or promise of her own. Her husband, Cub — whom she married as a pregnant teenager — is a kind but passive man who cedes all decisions to his domineering parents who own the sheep farm where they all live and work. Dellarobia submits to the mind-numbing duties of her life, but for the whole of her marriage has been bedeviled by fantasies of illicit affairs.

At the end of a gloomy, relentlessly rainy summer and autumn she finds herself at the limits of her endurance. In the novel’s opening pages she strikes out recklessly, thrilled and terrified, having agreed for the first time to an actual tryst with another man taking viagra . Dellarobia is on her way up the mountain to a secluded hunting shed when she is stopped in her tracks by what she believes to be a miracle: an entire forested valley alight with cold orange flame. She flees back to her life, keeping her strange secret, but soon learns her father-in-law plans to clear-cut the forest for urgently-needed cash. In an impossible bind, Dellarobia finds a way to convince her husband and father-in-law to survey the forest before it is logged, without revealing her secret or why she discovered it. When the family treks up the mountain the truth is revealed, and the revelation is less miraculous — and more disturbingly unnatural — than she could have guessed.

The spectacular and freakish eruption of nature summons Dr. Ovid Byron, a charismatic scientist who arrives at the farm intent on investigation. Dellarobia and her five-year-old son Preston are enthralled by the exotic entomologist and his work. But others in the community, including farmers who have lost crops to the weather’s new extremes, are less receptive to his talk of global climate change and its repercussions for natural systems and human affairs. Everyone in the neighborhood and beyond, from religious fundamentalists to environmentalists and the ratings-conscious media, brings a point of view and a penchant for shaping the evidence to suit an agenda. The ordeal quickly grows beyond the boundaries of family, community and nation, carving its lasting effects on Dellarobia, forcing her to examine everything she has ever trusted as truth.

Flight Behavior

52 pages • 1 hour read

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Summary and Study Guide

Barbara Kingsolver’s 2012 novel Flight Behavior presents a compelling symbolic connection between Dellarobia Turnbow , an unhappy farm wife who secretly dreams of running away from it all, and a surprising migration of monarch butterflies that alight upon her in-law’s property in Feathertown, Tennessee. As the butterflies struggle to survive and reproduce to continue their species, Dellarobia struggles in her efforts to deal with the consequences of her past decisions and the possibility of her new life. Her delayed coming-of-age opens up a multitude of options for her and her children.

The novel begins as Dellarobia strides up the family’s mountain path to meet up with a man she plans to sleep with. Desperate to do something to sabotage the marriage she is trapped in, Dellarobia sees adultery as a means by which to express her unhappiness. When she was seventeen and pregnant, her shotgun marriage to Cub Turnbow seemed to cement her future. As she grows resentful and bored of her life as a stay-at-home mom and farmer’s wife, she decides on an act of self-destruction, only to be stopped in her tracks by an fantastic sight: thousands upon thousands of monarch butterflies are hanging from the trees at the top of the High Road trail. Believing this is a sign, Dellarobia decides not to pursue the affair and returns to her home a changed woman. 

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When Dellarobia finds out that her father-in-law, Bear Turnbow , plans to sell the land where the butterflies had roosted to a logging company, she encourages her husband to look the land over first. The entire family heads up the trail and is awestruck by the sight of the bright orange and black insects filling their forest and valley. The religious Turnbows share this knowledge at their church, and the vision is declared akin to a miracle by the pastor. 

Bear is not convinced that this is God’s work, and because his family desperately needs the money, he pushes on with the logging project. Meanwhile, visitors and tourists from all over the world come to the Turnbow property to have a glimpse of the butterflies, and the family begins charging for tours. One visitor, scientist Ovid Byron , meets Dellarobia and tells her that he needs to study these butterflies. They usually migrate to Mexico, but severe flooding due to logging destroyed their homes, and for some reason, they came here to Feathertown. Ovid believes that the butterflies’ arrival presages a disastrous result of global warming .

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Dellarobia, Ovid, and Ovid’s assistants begin to work together in Ovid’s makeshift lab, which he parks on the Turnbow property. While doing so, they learn a great deal about their significant socioeconomic differences. Dellarobia has always been considered intelligent, but she is aware that her hometown provided a subpar education to her because the emphasis was on becoming a farmer, not on going to college. Despite her limited background, Dellarobia gets a job working for Ovid and finds a sincere passion for studying the butterflies. Unlike Cub, Ovid earns Dellarobia’s respect, and she develops a crush on him. The arrival of his wife quickly ends that fantasy, but not Dellarobia’s new desire to branch out on her own and see if she can make a future for herself and her children.

With the assistance of the local pastor and, surprisingly, Cub himself, Bear gives up the logging contract, and the Turnbow trail is made a preserve for the butterflies. A sudden winter storm nearly destroys the monarch colonies, but enough life emerges in the end to provide hope that the species will adapt and continue. Like the butterflies, Dellarobia hopes to do the same, and so she separates from her husband and moves away with her children, in order to start a new life. 

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Flight Behavior: A Novel Hardcover – Deckle Edge, November 6, 2012

New York Times Bestseller

Indie Bestseller

Barnes & Noble Bestseller

National Bestseller

Amazon Best Book of the Month

Indie Next Pick

Best Book of the Year: New York Times Notable, Washington Post Notable, Amazon Editor’s Choice, USA Today’s Top Ten (#1), St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Kansas City Star

Prize-winning author: Pulitzer Prize Finalist, Dayton Literary Peace Prize (Richard C. Holbrooke Distinguished Achievement Award), Orange Prize for Fiction

Prize-winning Author: National Humanities Medal, Pulitzer Prize Finalist, Orange Prize for Fiction, Dayton Literary Peace Prize (Richard C. Holbrooke Distinguished Achievement Award)

"Kingsolver is a gifted magician of words." — Time

The extraordinary New York Times bestselling author of The Lacuna (winner of the Orange Prize), The Poisonwood Bible (nominated for the Pulitzer Prize), and Animal, Vegetable, Miracle , Barbara Kingsolver returns with a truly stunning and unforgettable work. Flight Behavior is a brilliant and suspenseful novel set in present day Appalachia; a breathtaking parable of catastrophe and denial that explores how the complexities we inevitably encounter in life lead us to believe in our particular chosen truths. Kingsolver's riveting story concerns a young wife and mother on a failing farm in rural Tennessee who experiences something she cannot explain, and how her discovery energizes various competing factions—religious leaders, climate scientists, environmentalists, politicians—trapping her in the center of the conflict and ultimately opening up her world. Flight Behavior is arguably Kingsolver's must thrilling and accessible novel to date, and like so many other of her acclaimed works, represents contemporary American fiction at its finest.

• Print length 448 pages
• Language English
• Publisher Harper
• Publication date November 6, 2012
• Dimensions 6 x 1.24 x 9 inches
• ISBN-10 0062124269
• ISBN-13 978-0062124265
• See all details

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Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com review.

“Drawing on both her Appalachian roots and her background in biology, Kingsolver delivers a passionate novel on the effects of global warming.” — Booklist (starred review)

“With her powerful new novel, Kingsolver delivers literary fiction that conveys an urgent social message… a clarion call about climate change, too lucid and vivid for even skeptics to ignore.” — Publishers Weekly , Starred Review

"Enthralling…Dellarobia is appealingly complex as a smart, curious, warmhearted woman desperate to-no resisting the metaphor here-trade her cocoon for wings.” — O, the Oprah Magazine

“A dazzling page-turner” — Elle

“Kingsolver has written one of the more thoughtful novels about the scientific, financial and psychological intricacies of climate change. And her ability to put these silent, breathtakingly beautiful butterflies at the center of this calamitous and noisy debate is nothing short of brilliant.” — Washington Post

“The novel really soars in the exquisitely drawn scenes where a strapped woman feels claustrophobic in a dollar store or panicked during a job interview or wistful for her bright young son’s future. Dellarobia is a smart, fierce, messy woman, and one can’t help rooting for her to find her wings.” — Entertainment Weekly

“Dellarobia is appealingly complex as a smart, curious, warmhearted woman desperate to-no resisting the metaphor here-trade her cocoon for wings.” — O, the Oprah Magazine

“One of the gifts of a Kingsolver novel is the resplendence of her prose. She takes palpable pleasure in the craft of writing, creating images that stay with the reader long after her story is done…(a) majestic and brave new novel.” — New York Times Book Review

“An intricate story that entwines considerations of faith and faithlessness, inquiry, denial, fear and survival in gorgeously conceived metaphor. Kingsolver has constructed a deeply affecting microcosm of a phenomenon that is manifesting in many different tragic ways, in communities and ecosystems all around the globe. This is a fine and complex novel.” — Seattle Times

“So captivating is this grand, suspenseful plot and the many subplots rising and falling beneath it that it takes some time before we realize what this story is really about —climate change.” — Minneapolis Star Tribune

“Spirituality, a troubled marriage, global warming…Kingsolver’s latest is a bold mélange, but it works.” — People

“Kingsolver is a storyteller first and foremost, as sensitive to human interactions and family dynamics as she is to ecological ones.” — NPR

“A delicate symbiosis between the sacred and the scientific in this richly rewarding novel that will both entertain and incite its readers.” — BookPage

“FLIGHT BEHAVIOR is a book worth reading twice? first for the intricacies of character, second for the dense, beautiful language Kingsolver puts on the page. She’s a keen observer of the messiness and unexpected beauty of the quotidian.” — Cleveland Plain Dealer

“By the end of FLIGHT BEHAVIOR, it’s clear that Kingsolver’s passionate voice and her ability to portray the fragility of the natural world, and why we should care about it, are as strong as ever.” — San Francisco Chronicle

“Novelists like Kingsolver have a particular knack for making us empathize with lives that may bear little resemblance to our own…What lifts FLIGHT BEHAVIOR…is not just Kingsolver’s nuanced and funny prose; it’s Dellarobia’s awakening to the possibilities around her.” — Julia Ingalls, Salon

“A terrifically entertaining read about a spirited young woman you’ll miss the minute you reach the last page.” — USA Today

“Marvelous…This is fiction rich in empathy, wit and science. Like the butterflies that astonish Feathertown, Kingsolvian gifts are ‘fierce and wondrous,’ ‘colors moving around like fire.’” — New York Times

“[Kingsolver’s] keen grasp of delicate ecosystems-both social and natural-keeps the story convincing and compelling.” — The New Yorker

From the Back Cover

Flight Behavior transfixes from its opening scene, when a young woman's narrow experience of life is thrown wide with the force of a raging fire. In the lyrical language of her native Appalachia, Barbara Kingsolver bares the rich, tarnished humanity of her novel's inhabitants and unearths the modern complexities of rural existence. Characters and reader alike are quickly carried beyond familiar territory here, into the unsettled ground of science, faith, and everyday truces between reason and conviction.

Dellarobia Turnbow is a restless farm wife who gave up her own plans when she accidentally became pregnant at seventeen. Now, after a decade of domestic disharmony on a failing farm, she has settled for permanent disappointment but seeks momentary escape through an obsessive flirtation with a younger man. As she hikes up a mountain road behind her house to a secret tryst, she encounters a shocking sight: a silent, forested valley filled with what looks like a lake of fire. She can only understand it as a cautionary miracle, but it sparks a raft of other explanations from scientists, religious leaders, and the media. The bewildering emergency draws rural farmers into unexpected acquaintance with urbane journalists, opportunists, sightseers, and a striking biologist with his own stake in the outcome. As the community lines up to judge the woman and her miracle, Dellarobia confronts her family, her church, her town, and a larger world, in a flight toward truth that could undo all she has ever believed.

Flight Behavior takes on one of the most contentious subjects of our time: climate change. With a deft and versatile empathy Kingsolver dissects the motives that drive denial and belief in a precarious world.

About the Author

Barbara Kingsolver was born in 1955 and grew up in rural Kentucky. She earned degrees in biology from DePauw University and the University of Arizona, and has worked as a freelance writer and author since 1985. At various times she has lived in England, France, and the Canary Islands, and has worked in Europe, Africa, Asia, Mexico, and South America. She spent two decades in Tucson, Arizona, before moving to southwestern Virginia where she currently resides.

Her books, in order of publication, are:  The Bean Trees  (1988),  Homeland  (1989),  Holding the Line: Women in the Great Arizona Mine Strike  (1989),  Animal Dreams  (1990),  Another America  (1992),  Pigs in Heaven  (1993),  High Tide in Tucson  (1995),  The Poisonwood Bible  (1998),  Prodigal Summer  (2000),  Small Wonder  (2002),  Last Stand: America’s Virgin Lands,  with photographer Annie Griffiths (2002),  Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life  (2007),  The Lacuna  (2009),  Flight Behavior  (2012),  Unsheltered  (2018),  How To Fly (In 10,000 Easy Lessons)  (2020),  Demon Copperhead  (2022), and coauthored with Lily Kingsolver,  Coyote's Wild Home  (2023). She served as editor for Best American Short Stories 2001. 

Kingsolver was named one the most important writers of the 20th Century by Writers Digest, and in 2023 won a Pulitzer Prize for her novel  Demon Copperhead . In 2000 she received the National Humanities Medal, our country’s highest honor for service through the arts. Her books have been translated into more than thirty languages and have been adopted into the core curriculum in high schools and colleges throughout the nation. Critical acclaim for her work includes multiple awards from the American Booksellers Association and the American Library Association, a James Beard award, two-time Oprah Book Club selection, and the national book award of South Africa, among others. She was awarded Britain's prestigious Women's Prize for Fiction (formerly the Orange Prize) for both  Demon Copperhead  and  The Lacuna , making Kingsolver the first author in the history of the prize to win it twice. In 2011, Kingsolver was awarded the Dayton Literary Peace Prize for the body of her work. She is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

She has two daughters, Camille (born in 1987) and Lily (1996). She and her husband, Steven Hopp, live on a farm in southern Appalachia where they raise an extensive vegetable garden and Icelandic sheep. 

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Flight behavior, harpercollins publishers.

The Measure of a Man

A certain feeling comes from throwing your good life away andit is one part rapture. Or so it seemed for now, to a woman withflame-colored hair who marched uphill to meet her demise.Innocence was no part of this. She knew her own recklessness andmarveled, really, at how one hard little flint of thrill could outweighthe pillowy, suffocating aftermath of a long disgrace. Theshame and loss would infect her children too, that was the worstof it, in a town where everyone knew them. Even the teenagecashiers at the grocery would take an edge with her after this,clicking painted fingernails on the counter while she wrote hercheck, eying the oatmeal and frozen peas of an unhinged familyand exchanging looks with the bag boy: She's that one. Howthey admired their own steadfast lives. Right up to the day whenhope in all its versions went out of stock, including the crummydiscount brands, and the heart had just one instruction left: run.Like a hunted animal, or a racehorse, winning or losing feltexactly alike at this stage, with the same coursing of blood andshortness of breath. She smoked too much, that was anothermortification to throw in with the others. But she had cast herlot. Plenty of people took this way out, looking future damagein the eye and naming it something else. Now it was her turn.She could claim the tightness in her chest and call it bliss, ratherthan the same breathlessness she could be feeling at home rightnow while toting a heavy laundry basket, behaving like asensible mother of two.

The children were with her mother-in-law. She'd dropped offthose babies this morning on barely sufficient grounds and itmight just kill her to dwell on that now. Their little faces turnedup to her like the round hearts of two daisies: She loves me, loves menot. All those hopes placed in such a precarious vessel. Realistically,the family could be totaled. That was the word, like awrecked car wrapped around a telephone pole, no salvageableparts. No husband worth having is going to forgive adultery ifit comes to that. And still she felt pulled up this incline by thehand whose touch might bring down all she knew. Maybe sheeven craved the collapse, with an appetite larger than sense.

At the top of the pasture she leaned against the fence to catchup on oxygen, feeling the slight give of the netted woven wireagainst her back. No safety net. Unsnapped her purse, countedher cigarettes, discovered she'd have to ration them. This hadnot been a thinking ahead kind of day. The suede jacket waswrong, too warm, and what if it rained? She frowned at theNovember sky. It was the same dull, stippled ceiling that had beenup there last week, last month, forever. All summer. Whoeverwas in charge of weather had put a recall on blue and nailed upthis mess of dirty white sky like a lousy drywall job. The pasturepond seemed to reflect more light off its surface than thesky itself had to offer. The sheep huddled close around its shineas if they too had given up on the sun and settled for secondbest. Little puddles winked all the way down Highway 7 towardFeathertown and out the other side of it, toward Cleary, a longtrail of potholes glinting with watery light.

The sheep in the field below, the Turnbow family land, the white framehouse she had not slept outside for a single night in ten-plus yearsof marriage: that was pretty much it. The wide screen version of her lifesince age seventeen. Not including the brief hospital excursions,childbirth related. Apparently, today was the day she walked out of the picture.Distinguishing herself from the luckless sheep that stood down therein the mud surrounded by the deep stiletto holes of their footprints,enduring life's bad deals. They'd worn their heavy wool through themuggy summer and now that winter was almost here, theywould be shorn. Life was just one long proposition they neversaw coming. Their pasture looked drowned. In the next fieldover, the orchard painstakingly planted by the neighbors lastyear was now dying under the rain. From here it all looked fixedand strange, even her house, probably due to the angle. She onlylooked out those windows, never into them, given the companyshe kept with people who rolled plastic trucks on the floor.Certainly she never climbed up here to check out the domesticarrangement. The condition of the roof was not encouraging.Her car was parked in the only spot in the county that wouldn'tincite gossip, her own driveway. People knew that station wagonand still tended to think of it as belonging to her mother. She'drescued this one thing from her mother's death, an unreliable setof wheels adequate for short errands with kids in tow. The priceof that was a disquieting sense of Mama still coming along forthe ride, her tiny frame wedged between the kids' car seats,reaching across them to ash her cigarette out the open window. Butno such thoughts today. This morning after leaving the kids atHester's, she had floored it for the half mile back home, feelinghigh and wobbly as a kite. Went back into the house only to brushher teeth, shed her glasses and put on eyeliner, no other preparationsnecessary prior to lighting out her own back door to wreckher reputation. The electric pulse of desire buzzed through herbody like an alarm clock gone off in the early light, setting inmotion all the things in a day that can't be stopped.

She picked her way now through churned up mud along thefence, lifted the chain fastener on the steel gate and slippedthrough. Beyond the fence an ordinary wildness of ironweed andbriar thickets began. An old road cut through it, long unused,crisscrossed by wild raspberries bending across in tall arcs. Inrecent times she'd come up here only once, berry picking with herhusband Cub and some of his buddies two summers ago, and itdefinitely wasn't her idea. She'd been barrel round pregnantwith Cordelia and thinking she might be called on to deliver thechild right there in the brambles, that's how she knew whichJune that was. So Preston would have been four. She rememberedhim holding her hand for dear life while Cub's hotdogfriends scared them half to death about snakes. These raspberrycanes were a weird color for a plant, she noticed now, not thatshe would know nature if it bit her. But bright pink? The colorof a frosted lipstick some thirteen-year old might want to wear.She had probably skipped that phase, heading straight forImmoral Coral and Come-to-Bed Red.

The saplings gave way to a forest. The trees clenched the lastof summer's leaves in their fists, and something made her thinkof Lot's wife in the Bible, who turned back for one last look athome. Poor woman, struck into a pile of salt for such a smalldisobedience. She did not look back, but headed into the woodson the rutted track her husband's family had always called theHigh Road. As if, she thought. Taking the High Road to damnation;the irony had failed to cross her mind when she devisedthis plan. The road up the mountain must have been cut forlogging in the old days. The woods had grown back. Cub andhis dad drove the all terrain up this way sometimes to get to thelittle shack on the ridge they used for turkey hunting. Or theyused to do that, once upon a time, when the combined weightof the Turnbow men senior and junior was about sixty poundsless than the present day. Back when they used their feet forsomething other than framing the view of the television set.The road must have been poorly maintained even then. Sherecalled their taking the chain saw for clearing windfall.

She and Cub used to come up here by themselves in those days,too, for so called picnics. But not once since Cordie and Prestonwere born. It was crazy to suggest the turkey blind on the familyproperty as a place to hook up. Trysting place, she thought, wordsfrom a storybook. And: No sense prettying up dirt, words from amother-in-law. So where else were they supposed to go? Herown bedroom, strewn with inside out work shirts and a onelegged Barbie lying there staring while a person tried to get inthe mood? Good night. The Wayside Inn out on the highwaywas a pitiful place to begin with, before you even started deductingthe wages of sin. Mike Bush at the counter would greether by name: How do, Mrs. Turnbow, now how's them kids?The path became confusing suddenly, blocked with branches.The upper part of a fallen tree lay across it, so immense she hadto climb through, stepping between sideways limbs with clammyleaves still attached. Would he find his way through this orwould the wall of branches turn him back? Her heart bumpedaround at the thought of losing this one sweet chance. Onceshe'd passed through, she considered waiting. But he knew theway. He said he'd hunted from that turkey blind some seasonsago. With his own friends, no one she or Cub knew. Younger,his friends would be.

She smacked her palms together to shuck off the damp gritand viewed the corpse of the fallen monster. The tree was intact,not cut or broken by wind. What a waste. After maybe centuriesof survival it had simply let go of the ground, the wide fist of itsroot mass ripped up and resting naked above a clay gash in thewooded mountainside. Like herself, it just seemed to have comeloose from its station in life. After so much rain upon rain thiswas happening all over the county, she'd seen it in the paper,massive trees keeling over in the night to ravage a family'sroof line or flatten the car in the drive. The ground took wateruntil it was nothing but soft sponge and the trees fell out of it.Near Great Lick a whole hillside of mature timber had plummetedtogether, making a landslide of splintered trunks, rock and rill.People were shocked, even men like her father-in-law who tendedto meet any terrible news with "That's nothing," claiming alreadyto have seen everything in creation. But they'd never seenthis and had come to confessing it. In such strange times, theymay have thought God was taking a hand in things and wouldthus take note of a lie.

The road turned up steeply toward the ridge and petered outto a single track. A mile yet to go, maybe, she was just guessing.She tried to get a move on, imagining that her long, straight redhair swinging behind her might look athletic, but in truth herfeet smarted badly and so did her lungs. New boots. There wasone more ruin to add to the pile. The boots were genuine calfskin,dark maroon, hand-tooled uppers and glossy pointed toes,so beautiful she'd nearly cried when she found them at SecondTime Around while looking for something decent for Prestonto wear to kindergarten. The boots were six dollars, in like newcondition, the soles barely scuffed. Someone in the world hadsuch a life, they could take one little walk in expensive newboots and then pitch them out, just because. The boots weren'ta perfect fit but they looked good on, so she bought them, herfirst purchase for herself in over a year, not counting hygieneproducts. Or cigarettes, which she surely did not count. She'dkept the boots hidden from Cub for no good reason but to keepthem precious. Something of her own. In the normal course offamily events, every other thing got snatched from her hands:her hairbrush, the TV clicker, the soft middle part of hersandwich, the last Coke she'd waited all afternoon to open.She'd once had a dream of birds pulling the hair from her headin sheaves to make their red nests.

Not that Cub would notice if she wore these boots, and notthat she'd had occasion. So why put them on this morning towalk up a muddy hollow in the wettest fall on record? Blackleaves clung like dark fish scales to the tooled leather halfway upher calves. This day had played in her head like a movie onround-the-clock reruns, that's why. With an underemployedmind clocking in and out of a scene that smelled of urine andmashed bananas, daydreaming was one thing she had in abundance.

The price was right. She thought about the kissingmostly, when she sat down to manufacture a fantasy in earnest,but other details came along, setting and wardrobe. This mightbe a difference in how men and women devised their fantasies,she thought. Clothes: present or absent. The calfskin boots werea part of it, as were the suede jacket borrowed from her bestfriend, Dovey, and the red chenille scarf around her neck, thingshe would slowly take off of her. She'd pictured it being cold like this,too. Her flyaway thoughts had not blurred out the inconveniencesaltogether. Her flushed cheeks, his warm hands smoothingthe orange hair at her temples, all these were part and parcel.She'd pulled on the boots this morning as if she'd received writteninstructions. (Continues...) Excerpted from Flight Behavior by Barbara Kingsolver . Copyright © 2012 by Barbara Kingsolver. Excerpted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher. Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

Product details

• Publisher ‏ : ‎ Harper; 1st Edition, 1st Printing (November 6, 2012)
• Language ‏ : ‎ English
• Hardcover ‏ : ‎ 448 pages
• ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0062124269
• ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0062124265
• Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 1.6 pounds
• Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 6 x 1.24 x 9 inches
• #7,245 in Family Life Fiction (Books)
• #7,521 in Women's Domestic Life Fiction
• #23,012 in Literary Fiction (Books)

About the author

Barbara kingsolver.

Her books, in order of publication, are: The Bean Trees (1988), Homeland (1989), Holding the Line: Women in the Great Arizona Mine Strike (1989), Animal Dreams (1990), Another America (1992), Pigs in Heaven (1993), High Tide in Tucson (1995), The Poisonwood Bible (1998), Prodigal Summer (2000), Small Wonder (2002), Last Stand: America's Virgin Lands, with photographer Annie Griffiths (2002), Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life (2007), The Lacuna (2009), Flight Behavior (2012), Unsheltered (2018), How To Fly (In 10,000 Easy Lessons) (2020), Demon Copperhead (2022), and coauthored with Lily Kingsolver, Coyote's Wild Home (2023). She served as editor for Best American Short Stories 2001.

Kingsolver was named one the most important writers of the 20th Century by Writers Digest, and in 2023 won a Pulitzer Prize for her novel Demon Copperhead. In 2000 she received the National Humanities Medal, our country's highest honor for service through the arts. Her books have been translated into more than thirty languages and have been adopted into the core curriculum in high schools and colleges throughout the nation. Critical acclaim for her work includes multiple awards from the American Booksellers Association and the American Library Association, a James Beard award, two-time Oprah Book Club selection, and the national book award of South Africa, among others. She was awarded Britain's prestigious Women's Prize for Fiction (formerly the Orange Prize) for both Demon Copperhead and The Lacuna, making Kingsolver the first author in the history of the prize to win it twice. In 2011, Kingsolver was awarded the Dayton Literary Peace Prize for the body of her work. She is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

She has two daughters, Camille (born in 1987) and Lily (1996). She and her husband, Steven Hopp, live on a farm in southern Appalachia where they raise an extensive vegetable garden and Icelandic sheep.

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Reading guide for Flight Behavior by Barbara Kingsolver

Summary  |  Excerpt  |  Reading Guide  |  Reviews  |  Beyond the Book  |  Read-Alikes  |  Genres & Themes  |  Author Bio

Flight Behavior

by Barbara Kingsolver

Critics' Opinion:

Readers' Opinion:

• Science, Health and the Environment
• Tenn. Va. W.Va. Ky.
• Contemporary
• Strong Women
• Books About Animals
• Nature & Environment

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About this Book

• Reading Guide

Reading Guide Questions

Please be aware that this discussion guide will contain spoilers!

• What is the significance of the novel's title? Talk about the imagery of flight. How is it represented throughout the story?
• How do the chapter titles relate both to scientific concepts as well as the events that unfold within each chapter itself?
• Describe Dellarobia. How is she of this mountain town in Tennessee and how is she different from it? How are she and her family connected to the land and to nature itself? How are they disconnected? How does this shape their viewpoints? How does she describe herself? Do you agree with her self-assessment?
• Talk about the characters names—Dellarobia, Preston, Cordelia, Dovey, Ovid Byron, Cub, Bear, Hester. How does the author's choice of nomenclature suit her characters? When you first meet these characters, including Pastor Bobby, what were your first impressions? Were your notions about them challenged as the story progressed?
• Describe the small town in Tennessee where Dellarobia lives. What are the people like? Are they familiar to you? What is everyday life like for them? What are their major joys and concerns? How you strike a balance between protecting nature when your livelihood depends upon its destruction?
• Talk about Della's relationships with the various people in her life: Cub, Hester, Pastor Bobby, Dovey, Ovid Byron. What do her experiences teach her about herself and life?
• How does Della react when she first sees the Monarchs? What greater meaning do the butterflies hold for her? How is she like the butterflies? How does finding them transform her life? Were the butterflies a miracle?
• As news of her discovery spreads, what are the reactions of her in-laws and her neighbors? How do they view Della? What are their impressions of the scientists and tourists who descend upon their remote town?
• What does Dellarobia think about her new friends, and especially Ovid Byron? What about the scientists—how do they view people like Della, her family, and her neighbors? Does either side see they other realistically?
• Cub and his father, Bear, want to sell the patch of forest where the Monarchs are to a lumber company for clear-cutting. What ramifications would this have, not only for the butterflies but for Della's family and her town? Why is it often difficult for people see the long-term effects of their immediate actions? Cub doesn't consider conserving nature to be his problem. What might you say to convince him otherwise?
• Though she may not have a formal education beside her high school diploma, would you call Dellarobia wise? Where does her knowledge come from? Is she religious? Their Christian faith is very important to many of her neighbors. How does Barbara Kingsolver portray religion, faith, and God in the novel? What are your impressions of Pastor Bobby?
• "Kids in Feathertown wouldn't know college-bound from a hole in the ground. They don't need it for life around here. College is kind of irrelevant.," Della tells Ovid. Why isn't college important to these people? Should it be? Would you say the people of Feathertown respect education? Why is faith and instinct enough for some people? When she explained this to Ovid, "His eyes went wide, as if she'd mentioned they boiled local children alive. His shock gave her a strange satisfaction she could not have explained. Insider status, maybe." Explain her attitude. Yet Dellarobia also believes that, "educated people had powers." What does she mean by this? How does education empower people? Can it also blind them?
• After Dellarobia's parents died, what options did she have? She wanted to go to school—and did try—she tells Ovid. "People who hadn't been through it would think it was that simple: just get back on the bus, ride to the next stop. He would have no inkling of the great slog of effort that tied up people like her in the day to day. Or the quaking misgivings that infected every step forward, after a loss. Even now, dread still struck her down sometimes if she found herself counting on things being fine. Meaning her now-living children and their future, those things. She had so much more to lose now than just herself or her own plans." What are the factors that hold back people in Dellarobia's circumstances? How can they be overcome? How is each character's ideas about the future colored by his or her circumstances?
• Flight Behavior illuminates the conflicting attitudes of different classes towards nature and the idea of climate change. How does each side see this issue? Where do they find common ground? Do you believe in global warming or climate change? Explain the basis of your beliefs. How much do you know about both the proponents and opponents in this debate?
• Why do so many Americans fear or dislike science? Why do so many others fear or dislike religion? What impact do these attitudes have on the nation now and what do they portend for our future?
• For Dellarobia, "Nobody truly decided for themselves, there was too much information. What they actually did was scope around, decide who was looking out for their clan, and sign on for the memos on a wide array of topics." Do you agree that this is a fair assessment of a divided America? How can we get beyond our judgments and stereotypes?
• How is media both a help and a hindrance in our understanding of social issues? How does it offer clarity and how does it add confusion? How is the media portrayed in Flight Behavior ? What impact does it have on Dellarobia and the fate of the butterflies? People are envious that the media pays attention to Dellarobia, yet she says being interviewed was like, "having her skin peeled off." Why are so many people consumed by a desire for fame?
• Ovid has doubts about his work. "What was the use of saving a world that had no soul left in it. Continents without butterflies, seas without coral reefs, he meant. What if all human effort amounted basically to saving a place for ourselves to park?" he asks Dellarobia? How would you answer him?
• Flight Behavior interweaves important themes: religion and science, poverty and wealth, education and instinct or faith, intolerance and acceptance, How are these themes used to complement each other and how do they conflict? Choose one theme and trace it throughout the novel, explaining how it illuminates a particular character's life.
• At the end of the novel, Dellarobia recalls when Ovid Byron first met Preston and declared the boy a scientist. "A moment, Dellarobia now believed, that changed Preston's life. You never knew which split second might be the zigzag bolt dividing all that went before from everything that comes next." Have you ever had such a defining moment in your life? Was there a special person who influenced you and helped guide or shift the course of your life?
• What do you think will happen to Dellarobia, Preston, and Cordelia?
• What did you take away from reading Flight Behavior ?

Unless otherwise stated, this discussion guide is reprinted with the permission of Harper Perennial. Any page references refer to a USA edition of the book, usually the trade paperback version, and may vary in other editions.

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