June 4, 2019
Notes
In attendance:
Liz Clarke, Janice Loschiavo, Lois Pagnozzi, Meta Pitrelli, Sharon Rome, Barbara Santillo, Tina Segali, Marilyn Sinisi, Joan Swensen.


Book & Author: Where the Crawdads Sing, by Delia Owens.


Amidst all the compliments to Barbara on her new silver locks, we learned that Vivian has a new grandson who weighed in at 9’10”. Mom and baby are doing fine, although Vivian was feeling under the weather and unable to attend our meeting. Meta shared that she and Vinnie are moving to Washington Township, not far from their current home in Paramus.


Questions and Comments:
• The general response to the book was, “I loved it.” Members felt it was a wonderfully told story of strength and survival.
• What did Kya have in her, especially as a child, that enabled her to survive against brutal odds? She had had to learn early in life to survive because of her mother’s desertion and her father’s neglect. She learned how to take care of herself.
• Is it harder in life for a young boy or a young girl?
• The desire to live, to survive is tremendous. But the desire NOT to is also strong.
• When her older siblings left, Kya was devastated. But perhaps they were looking out for their own survival.
• It was sad how Kya had held out hope for so long that her mother would return. But ultimately her mother didn’t have the capacity to take care of her.
• What might have happened to the father?
• Do abusers love their victims? They love to control them.
• How could the mom have left and not taken her children with her? If she had, she wouldn’t have been able to survive.
• Why didn’t the “system” or the teachers pursue her absence? Attendance at school has been mandatory since the beginning of the 20th century so someone should have taken note.
• Mabel and her husband were so kind to Kya, and Kya was kind to animals.
• Kya was smart and talented as well. She learned to read, wrote poetry, draw, and eventually published books with only one day of school. Is this believable? Nature is a good teacher.
• Did the murder/accident and subsequent trial seem well-drawn? Who do you think was responsible?
The book was given a rating of 3.5.


Next Meeting: Due to vacation schedules, there will be no meeting in July. The next meetings will be Wednesday, August 14, and Wednesday, September 11. The tentative assignments for August are: Marilyn, fruit salad; Meta, green salad; Sharon, dessert; Liz & Vivian, unknown. Assignments will be confirmed by Liz the week before the meeting.
Next Book: Liz’s selection is The Prodigal Summer, by Barbara Kingsolver. Vivian will choose the book for September.
Submitted by Tina Segali
June 26, 2019


New York Times review of Prodigal Summer:
November 5, 2000
Men, Women and Coyotes
Barbara Kingsolver’s novel explores a variety of mating rituals.
By JENNIFER SCHUESSLER
PRODIGAL SUMMER
By Barbara Kingsolver.
444 pp. New York:
HrperCollins Publishers. $26.
Barbara Kingsolver’s new novel is all about sex, and she doesn’t waste much time on foreplay. As the book opens, Deanna Wolfe, a reclusive wildlife biologist on the far side of 40, is patrolling the woods on Zebulon Mountain, a wild patch of southern Appalachia where she works as a ranger. ”Here and now,” Kingsolver writes, ”spring heaved in its randy moment. Everywhere you looked, something was fighting for time, for light, the kiss of pollen, a connection of sperm and egg and another chance.” By Page 3, Deanna has found her own chance — Eddie Bondo, a 28-year-old Wyoming hunter with a hatred of coyotes that borders on religion and a taste for middle-aged women with long legs and salty tongues. The two eye each other warily and banter about the birds and the bees. ”Every single thing you hear in the woods right now is just nothing but . . . males drumming up business,” Deanna explains. By chapter’s end she and Eddie are drumming up some of their own, falling on each other for a serious Gore-Tex-ripping mingling of gametes — the ”pursuit of eternity,” biological style.
Meanwhile, down in the valley, Lusa Maluf Landowski Widener, a half-Palestinian, half-Jewish farmer’s wife with a degree in entomology, is bickering with her husband, Cole. The pair met when Cole was attending Lusa’s workshop on integrated pest management at the University of Kentucky, and he courted her ”with an intensity that caused her to ovulate during his visits.” But after less than a year of marriage, disagreements over weeding practices are getting in the way of the pheromones. Cole is out clearing honeysuckle from the barn while Lusa is inside reading and fuming. ”In many species of moths,” she thinks to herself, quoting Darwin, ”the males prefer to inhabit more open territory, while the females cling under cover. She and Cole were a biological cliché, was that it? A male and female following their separate natures?” But by the end of the chapter, Cole abruptly exits the picture, and Lusa finds herself in another stock situation — a city girl left alone to face down a pack of resentful redneck in-laws.
Down the road, the complications of courtship continue. Garnett Walker, a crotchety septuagenarian who dreams of reviving the extinct American chestnut, can’t stop thinking about his neighbor Nannie Rawley. Partly he’s enraged by her refusal to use pesticides in her orchards, where everything’s organic, ”capital O, with its placid, irritating sense of holier than thou.” But mostly he’s titillated by the witchcraft and other Unitarian debaucheries he imagines she’s guilty of. And so the stage is set for Kingsolver’s latest exploration of her perennial themes of family, community and global interconnectedness.
Readers hoping for the emotional intensity and wide-angle vision of ”The Poisonwood Bible,” Kingsolver’s magnificent 1998 epic about a self-destructing missionary family in the newly independent Congo, will most likely be disappointed. But the legions of fans primed on earlier books like ”Animal Dreams” and ”The Bean Trees” will find themselves back on familiar, well-cleared ground of plucky heroines, liberal politics and vivid descriptions of the natural world.
Once again Kingsolver is thinking globally but writing locally. Casting about for a way to survive as a small farmer without growing tobacco, Lusa hits on the idea of raising goats to bring to market at the confluence of Easter, Passover and the Muslim feast of Id al-Adha — the reconciliation of the religions through sustainable agriculture. Up on the mountain, Deanna is watching over the return of the coyote to the Appalachian Mountains, even as she distracts the über-predator, Eddie, with great sex and her doctoral thesis.
In ”The Poisonwood Bible,” the interlocking first-person narratives of the crazed evangelist’s wife and four daughters provided glimpses of dangerous, unmasterable reality through the cracks between the characters’ incomplete visions. But in ”Prodigal Summer,” the characters have all the answers, and you can hardly read a lush prose without tripping on a potted lecture by a woman bent on setting a man straight. ”Any woman will ovulate with the full moon if she’s exposed to enough moonlight,” Deanna explains to Eddie, amazed at ”the obvious animal facts people refused to know about their kind.” ”Don’t you get it? To kill a natural predator is a sin,” she tells him in a dialogue on the ethics of hunting. ”Herbivores tend to have shorter lives, and they reproduce faster; they’re just geared toward expendability.” On the matter of religion, Lusa reassures the sexy nephew she’s tempted to go to bed with that Muslims, Christians and Jews are all worshiping the same God. ”There’s just some disagreement about which son did or did not inherit the family goods. The same-old, same-old story.” The kid asks some more dumb questions, but that pretty much settles it. Only the delicately comic exchanges between Nanny and Garnett rise above this tub-thumping. Garnett may be a pigheaded old creationist coot, but he’s granted his own voice and inner life.
Kingsolver is an ambitious writer, but here she has bitten off a lot that she doesn’t really chapter of Kingsolver’s
chew. A richer book might’ve given life to the hunter’s worldview and Bible Belt ignorance rather than setting them up like bowling pins to be knocked down as resoundingly as possible. Sex with Eddie may be ”a miracle of nature,” but in the arguments with Deanna he’s seldom allowed to say anything she can’t snortingly dismiss. As for Lusa’s ”mongrel” background, it comes off as awkwardly hung multicultural window dressing.
”Prodigal Summer” has its plot twists, few of them surprising. As in any ecosystem (and any soap opera), everybody turns out to be related to aftershocks of a collision of sperm and egg. Lusa comes up with a novel solution to the Darwinist’s famous problem of explaining altruism, and Deanna realizes she may not be the evolutionary ”dead weight” she has imagined. In the end the expendable males have disappeared, and the women and children band together in their own blended families, like the coyotes of Zebulon Mountain. This may be an attractive fable, but it doesn’t make for the kind of psychologically complex literature Kingsolver is well capable of. Biology may be destiny in the forest, but good fiction — like good sex — happens mostly in the head.everybody else, and just about everyone’s fate is determined by the a