Flight Behavior / Barbara Kingsolver

The monarch butterfly of Eastern North America typically migrates thousands of miles in order to overwinter in the mountains of Mexico. This journey is all the more miraculous since the route is completed by several generations of the insect (so there is no “memory” of the route by any single butterfly). But this winter, in Kingsolver’s most recent work of fiction, Flight Behavior, due to fluctuating temperatures and other meteorological events tied to global warming, masses of orange monarchs drape the trees on the mountain overlooking the Turnbows’ farmstead in the Appalachian foothills of Tennessee. Their sudden and unexpected appearance is seen as a sign of God by some, and a harbinger of environmental collapse by others.

Entomologist Ovid Byron comes to Feathertown, TN, to study the monarchs, and Kingsolver uses his voice to deliver sometimes preachy sermons on how man is destroying his natural surroundings. (An interesting point that Kingsolver makes is that preserving the environment is often defined in terms that are class-based and elitist—she rather cleverly runs through a list of “things to do to save the world” and has her local protagonist discard them one by one—“Fly less?... I never fly”. As if responsibility for saving the environment is only for those who can afford to give things up.)

I liked this story, but not enough. Some of it dragged-- the scenes at the Dollar Store and the thrift store, for example, were just deadly, but maybe that’s because I consider an actual trip to these places an activity bordering on torture.

Barbara Kingsolver writes beautifully and her characters are well-developed, but sometimes the tension just wasn’t there. By the end of the novel, things start moving again, and the final scene was almost Biblical in how it unfolded. Reading Kingsolver is always rewarding, I just didn’t think that this effort was up to her usual standard.

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Here we are / Graham Swift

This short novel offers a nostalgic look at England in the 1940s and 1950s. Evie, having just lost her husband after a long marriage, looks back at the fateful summer when they met up at the pleasure palace at the end of the Brighton pier. Evie was meant to marry someone else, Ronnie Doane, aka “The Great Pablo,” a magician whose talents really pull in the crowds in the days before television kept people in their front rooms (and to whom she serves as the feather-plumed magician’s assistant). The novel tells of Ronnie’s back story as a London child war evacuee, whose second family in Oxford is so nurturing and loving that he is conflicted about going back to his real home when the war is over. But Evie marries Jack instead and is ghosted (quite literally) by Ronnie even in her final years of life. A wonderful story about people and relationships.

Addie Pray / Joe David Brown (more recently published as Paper Moon ) Click here to check for availability at AFPLS This 1971 novel was the inspiration for the Peter Bogdanovich movie Paper Moon . Eleven-year-old Addie and her maybe-father “Long Boy” Moses Pray crisscross the Deep South “ramifying” (scamming) people during the Great Depression. Addie’s street smarts and perceived girlish innocence, along with Long Boy’s cleverness and shrewd business acumen build their operation until they are dealing in millions. The movie remained pretty true to the first half of the book (though it moved the location from Alabama to Kansas), but the adventures continue far beyond where the movie left off. The decades haven’t dimmed the magic of this rollicking adventure, either in the film or the book. ©Ken Vesey, 17 June 2010

The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie / Alan Bradley

Pippi Longstocking meets Miss Marple in the character of precocious 11-year-old Flavia de Luce, the youngest of three daughters in a once well-to-do family in early 1950s rural England. This first mystery in an intended series finds Flavia beating the local police inspector at his own game in solving the mystery surrounding the murder of an old school mate of her father's in their back garden (in the cucumber patch no less). Clues include a bird indigenous to Norway, a rare stamp, and a bit of flaky pie crust. This nostalgic and innocent whodunnit will have you at the edge of your seat by its suspenseful climax. I can see BBC/PBS picking up on the popularity of this charming mystery. The second in the series has already been published and the third is soon to follow. And by the way, here's a great library quote from Flavia on page 50: "... it occurred to me that Heaven must be a place where the library is open twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. No

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