If she does not admit to herself how much she loves it, she will find it slipping through her fingers before she can do anything about it. Lusa married a farmer and the role of farmer's wife is still quite challenging for her, but she has quickly grown to love the wildness of the land itself, and finds herself in a situation where her hand is forced. Lusa Maluf Landowski is a city girl who keeps to herself, largely because she is aloof and does not know how to communicate with those who have come from a different environment. She does not know how to respond to him, and at once her sense of self-assuredness vanishes, as well as the peace and solitude she has deliberately constructed for herself.įurther down the mountain things are taking a strange turn too.

He is young, and invades her space, both physically and mentally. During this time, she is startled in her isolated wood cabin by a hunter named Eddie Bondo.

Her life putters on in a routine kind of way until one exceptionally hot summer when the overwhelming humidity seems to change the behaviors of those in the little community in which she lives. She picked the area - a remote rambling mountainous area of Virginia - because of its isolated farming community that she had believed would, for the most part, keep to themselves. Of course, there are other people around her but the more connection they try to force, the more reclusive Deanna becomes. We are thankful for their contributions and encourage you to make your own.ĭeanna Wolfe is not really what you might call a people person, and she has chosen a solitary job quite deliberately. Over the course of one long summer, these characters find connections to one another, and to the land, and the final, urgent truth that humans are only one piece of life on earth.Read by the author.These notes were contributed by members of the GradeSaver community. And a few more miles down the road, a pair of elderly, feuding neighbors tend their respective farms and wrangle about God, pesticides, and the possibilities the future holds. Down the mountain, another web of lives unfolds as Lusa Maluf Landowski, a bookish city girl turned farmer's wife, finds herself in a strange place where she must declare or lose her attachment to the land that has become her own. Deanna Wolfe, a reclusive wildlife biologist, watches them from an isolated mountain cabin where she is caught off-guard by Eddie Bondo, a young hunter who comes to invade her most private spaces and her solitary life. At the heart of these intertwined narratives is a den of coyotes that have recently migrated into the region.

Prodigal Summer weaves together three stories of human love within a larger tapestry of lives in southern Appalachia. Triumphing once again, Barbara Kingsolver has written a beautiful new novel: a hymn to wildness that celebrates the prodigal spirit of human nature, and of nature itself

A prodigal summer