Prodigal Summer Summary & Analysis

Deanna Wolf is a forest service worker who cares about the coyotes that have moved into the Zebulon National Forest which she monitors in Barbara Kingsolver’s Prodigal Summer. Deanna, who has a strong interest in predators and their places in the food chain, can scarcely believe that the coyotes are moving back into this area, and she is resolved not to give them away to the hunters who would kill them–especially to the hunter to whom she herself is so greatly attracted: Eddie Bondo. Another character in Prodigal Summer, Lusa Mulaf Landowski is a entomologist who turns farmer after she loses her husband. Lusa’s story wraps around and is inseparable from her interest in “bugs,” her horror of wanton pesticide use, and her desire for harmony in interactions among people, and of people with nature. Nannie Rawley is an apple grower whose organic fruit flourishes without the pesticides her neighbor Garnett Walker, a former agriculture teacher, wants to employ to kill the weeds that threaten the “neatness” of his farm. Nannie’s and Garnett’s feuding provides not only comic relief in Prodigal Summer, but also a running commentary on living in harmony with the world, and destruction of species in specific areas.

In Denise Giardina’s Storming Heaven, after her husband and sons are killed in a mine explosion, Rosa Angelelli, trapped in a strange land in an unbearable life, speaks with the butterflies that her employer, the mine operator Lytton Davidson, has collected, much as he has collected men from various parts of the globe, pinning them to work in the mines, work that often kills them, or, in the case of the butterflies, in glass cases so that they can be admired. She narrates: “The butterflies weep. Let us out, they cry. The glass case is so hot” (196). As Davidson’s house where Rosa is living burns as a part of a strike action, Rondal Lloyd finds her, in the house, breaking the glass of the case with an oil lamp to free the butterflies. Rosa and Rondal Lloyd do free...