Flight Behavior
Flight Behavior is a 2012 novel by Barbara Kingsolver. It is her seventh novel, a New York Times bestseller, and was declared "Best book of the year" by the Washington Post and USA Today.
Plot
Dellarobia Turnbow is a 28-year-old discontented housewife living with her poor family on a farm in Appalachia. On a hike to begin an affair with a telephone repairman, Turnbow finds millions of monarch butterflies in the valley behind her home.
As the news of her discovery spreads, university professor Ovid Byron arrives to study the monarchs, and warns that although they are beautiful, they are a disturbing symptom of global climate change, displaced from their established winter habitat in Mexico, and that they may not survive the harsh Tennessee winter.
Critical reception
According to Book Marks, the book received a "positive" consensus, based on fourteen critic reviews: five "rave", five "positive", one "mixed", and three "pan". On The Omnivore, a British aggregator of press reviews, the book received an "omniscore" of 3.5 out of 5. Culture Critic assessed critical response as an aggregated score of 88% based on an accumulation of British and American press reviews. In January/February 2013 issue of Bookmarks, the book was scored three and a half out of five stars. The magazine's critical summary reads: "Although a hot-button issue is never far from center stage here, readers who enjoy settling in with an old pro and spending time with likable, realistically flawed characters will again find an able guide in Kingsolver".
Writing in UK Sunday newspaper The Observer, Robin McKie found,
McKie was less impressed with Kingsolver's portrayal, "almost to the point of overkill", of the Turnbow family's poverty. "However", he added, "it is the issue of climate change that hangs, unspoken, over proceedings", and concluded by saying, "[...] Kingsolver makes her message clear. If only a few more scientists started screaming on TV and radio then we might have a chance to avoid the worst of the calamities that lie ahead".
In The Daily Telegraph, Beth Jones noted that, "Kingsolver has carved a career from examining social issues in her novels, from economic inequality to racism. In Flight Behaviour, it's the causes and consequences of climate change that form the novel's core. As lepidopterist Ovid Bryon shouts: 'For God's sake… the damn globe is catching fire and the islands are drowning. The evidence is staring [you] in the face'". Jones found that, "[...] in Flight Behaviour she once again manages to make a global crisis seem relevant through tiny domestic details", before concluding that, "The result is a compelling plot with lyrical passages and flashes of humour. Absorbing and entertaining, Flight Behaviour engages the reader in the quotidian details of Dellarobia's life, while insisting that we never forget the crumbling world beneath her, and our, feet".
Reviewing the book in The New York Times, Dominique Browning wrote of