Currently Reading: Prodigal Summer

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In high school, I took a Women's Lit class my junior year.  Strange as it may sound, a classroom of all girls when you are sixteen years old is not the most nurturing place.  Fights managed to break out over everything, including my personal favorite during an abortion debate, where one of my friends made her point by repeatedly yelling "Do you eat eggs?!" at a girl with a differing opinion.  The joys of public education.

One highlight of that year was reading Barbara Kingsolver's The Poisonwood Bible.  It managed to bring the class together to have insightful discussions rather than screaming matches.  This is my first novel of Kingsolver's since then, but I'm enjoying it so far (all two chapters I've managed to read since starting it last night).

The story as of yet takes place in the Zebulon Valley of Virginia, on the Kentucky border, and follows a forest ranger intent on finding coyotes, but distracted by her new young lover, and a housewife from the city struggling with rural life and longing to get back to her life as a scientist studying moths.

Nature plays a large role in the novel and also acts as a descriptor of the characters themselves.  While the forest ranger sees the world as rich and varied, like the woods around her, the housewife sees the rolling farmland surrounding her as the emptiness swallowing her whole.  Very much looking forward to this read.

UPDATE: I finished last week's book and it was a doozy.  After doing the research I should've done then, I realized that David Mitchell also wrote Cloud Atlas, deemed "unfilmable", but made into a movie this past year.  Ghostwritten is also probably pretty unfilmable only because its story was so expansive and encompassed so many locations, characters, relationships, languages, etc.  The novel was great and I enjoyed reading it, but I didn't totally "get" it, so it deserves a second reading.