Flight Behavior by Barbara Kingsolver

"She was embarassed that her five-year-old was asking questions that had not occurred to her. But she refused to be first in the long line of people who would shrug him off. 'We'll have to look that up.'.....Googling a butterfly. It sounded comical, like tickling a catfish, but she knew it wouldn't sound that way to Preston. He would clamber up to the computer at Bear and Hester's and punch the keys, finding what he needed in there. Having children was not like people said. Forget training them in your footsteps; the minute they put down the teething ring and found the Internet, you were useless as a source of anything but shoes and a winter coat."
                                                       -from the novel, page 93



I chose to read Flight Behavior because I saw it on the Best Seller list a few months back and because I had read The Poisonwood Bible by this author several years ago and liked it. I didn't enjoy this one nearly as much; I will rate it a 3. The writing is excellent, though wordy at times. She can really turn a phrase, for example when the main character, Dellarobia, is describing her young daughter scattering Cheerios in the living room carpet as if she were planting seeds, she writes that the resulting grit on the soles of everyone's feet will be "like a beach vacation minus the beach, and the vacation." Humorous, I thought.

I had a hard time relating to the setting, a farm in Tennessee. Dellarobia's family raised sheep which I knew little or nothing about. Because of these things, it was somewhat difficult to identify with the characters. The science got a little deep for me at times also, understandable since the author studied biology and worked as a scientist. I was intrigued by the appearance of the monarch butterflies, seen by some in the story as a miracle. I especially loved the idea first put forth by Josefina, the little Mexican-American girl, that when babies die, their souls become butterflies. A lovely idea!

I absolutely could relate to the environmental theme of the story. Global warming is something that I believe is real and it greatly concerns me. Quite possibly this is what kept me reading to the end.