I’m fascinated with the rise of the fictionalized historical and scientific accounts. These are authors who have stumbled upon stories of people and history which involve complicated and detailed expert knowledge. These authors have studied and researched and then crafted a story around these fascinating events, so that readers might encounter and learn something.
Flight Behavior is much like this. Kingsolver in all the books I have read combines people, events and cultures in a way much like we encounter in our daily lives. Her stores and characters are never single-dimensional, but change with the light of another page turned or a connection become solidified in the reader’s mind.
I love her strong women in this book and the way they wrestle with the culture they have grown up in and how those perceptions are challenged when outsiders end up literally in their backyard. It’s in those conversations about tuna casserole and leg of lamb, which was taken from a sheep they had named, that I realized that we all are trying to figure out how we are as we understand that the world is so much bigger than the world we encounter daily.
The importance of life and resurrection and hope are what the reader is left with after the last page and if that isn’t truly transformative, then I don’t know what is.
