I really, really liked her, and I was on her side fromīeginning to end - rooting for her to figure that ineffable 'it' out. My favorite part of this novel was Dellarobia. Bryan with his research), and challenging her own beliefs - both in terms of her conservative, religious values, and also her marriage to her husband, a shotgun affair when they were still in high school because Dellarobia was pregnant - she begins to wonder what it might take to change her station in life. Throughout the novel, as Dellarobia becomes more involved in studying the butterflies (she gets a job helping Dr. Ovid Bryan, who takes up residence in a trailer on Cub and Dellarobia's farm to study the monarchs. Soon, folks from all over the world begin descending upon this small, quiet, conservative Tennessee town to witness what some consider a miracle and what most consider to be a terrifying effect of climate change - including the handsome, enigmatic Dr. But as she treks into the woods to the spot for her illicit rendezvous, she witnesses the side of a mountain as if it were a 'lake of fire.' What she's seeing is actually a huge swarm of monarch butterflies, who have taken a wrong turn (much like Dellarobia with her hasty marriage) on their way to their usual winter home in Mexico, and alighted on this mountain in Tennessee. And she's about to throw away her good name on an affair. In both cases, though, we do have the power to combat the inertia of entrenched beliefs - it just takes some courage, discipline and a hell of a lot of hard work.ĭellarobia Turnbow is a married mother of two living on a farm in Eastern Tennessee with her husband Cub. But the novel also examines how poor choices in our personal lives can become victims of their own logic - that how things are is how they'll be, and they can't be changed. Yes, the back drop for Barbara Kingsolver's new novel Flight Behavior is climate change. Nor does it mean that we'll always be convinced by reason, or when presented with overwhelming factual evidence.

Humans are the only animal that can use logic, but that doesn't mean we're always logical.

Flight behaviour