Barbara Kingsolver's Flight Behavior

To read a Barbara Kingsolver novel is to enter a well-described world with memorable and flawed characters rooted in a sense of place. Having read The Bean Trees and The Poisonwood Bible, I knew I'd be in the hands of a capable storyteller whose narrative would masterfully evoke a deeper meaning. Flight Behavior is a book about so many things--environment, family, loss, dreams, and experience--but all those things seem to fall under one big thing: change.

I wanted to read Flight Behavior because of its plot about the environment, and the book was surely an elegant way to tell a literary story with an important message about nature, both in the sense of flora and fauna as well human nature. The main character, Dellarobia, really becomes quite the heroine as she works through her personal issues and changes that parallel the environmental change that occurs on their land. At first, when a monarch butterfly population uncharacteristically migrates to Dellarobia's hometown, it is seen as a blessing, and while in some ways the opportunities the butterflies create for Dellarobia and her family are a blessing, the more Dellarobia learns about the butterflies, the more she realizes this change in migratory direction puts the survival of the butterflies at risk. And so it goes that we see how one change in course, one variance in flight behavior, can gain problematic momentum if the course is not readjusted. This is true for Dellarobia, who struggles to find her true course and struggles to come to grips with the consequences (good and bad) that changes may have. The novel suggests that this, too, is true for the environment, for as the global community continues on its unnatural course, the realities and consequences of global warming only accumulate and the chance to correct the course becomes more difficult and the possibility of doing so less optimistic. However, I think what we are meant to learn from our heroine Dellarobia is that, no matter how difficult, it is not too late to try to correct where you went wrong and to try to make the world, and your own personal world, a more thriving place, and at the very least set an example for those around you.

Kingsolver, Barbara. Flight Behavior. New York: Harper / HarperCollins, 2012.