It had to mean something.Īlthough Dellarobia doesn’t realize it yet, that moment proves life-changing for her: no longer “watching a nearly touchable lover behind her eyelids but now seeing flame in patterns that swirled and rippled. It looked like the inside of joy, if a person could see that. For her alone these orange boughs lifted, these long shadows became brightness rising. Unearthly beauty had appeared to her, a vision of glory to stop her in the road. This was not just another fake thing in her life’s cheap chain of events, leading up to this day of sneaking around in someone’s thrown-away boots. She couldn’t remember when she’d had such room for being. She was pressed by the quiet elation of escape and knowing better and seeing straight through to the back of herself, in solitude.

Fascination curled itself around her fright. The impossible…She was on her own here, staring at glowing trees. The sparks spiraled upwards in swirls like funnel clouds….It was a lake of fire, something far more fierce and wondrous than either of those elements alone. “Jesus God,” she said again…Trees turned to fire…The flame now appeared to lift from individual treetops in shows of orange sparks, exploding the way a pine log does in a campfire when it’s poked. Brightness of a new intensity moved up the valley in a rippling wave. “Jesus,” she said, not calling for help, she and Jesus weren’t that close, but putting her voice in the world because nothing else present made sense…The mountain seemed to explode with light. The forest blazed with its own internal flame. But the rapture she’s about to experience is not from the thrill of truancy it will come from the intervention of Nature:Ī small shift between cloud and sun altered the daylight, and the whole landscape intensified, brightening before her eyes. The first line of Kingsolver’s book reads:Ī certain feeling comes from throwing your good life away, and it is one part rapture.ĭellarobia thinks she’s about to throw away her ordinary life by running away with the telephone man. The book starts with her scrambling up the forested mountain-slated to be clear cut-behind her eastern Tennessee farmhouse she is desperate to take flight from her dull and pointless marriage of myopic routine. The premise of climate change and its effect on the monarch butterfly migration is told through the eyes of Dellarobia Turnbow, a rural housewife, who yearns for meaning in her life. In a world that’s quickly heating up and drying up, you can’t go home again-even if you never leave-Clive Thompsonīarbara Kingsolver’s 2012 novel Flight Behavior was, according to The Globe and Mail, the first novel that dealt “specifically, determinedly and overtly with climate change.

Flight behavior review