Finished: Flight Behavior (Kingsolver) Book Club Book #7. A deeply moving and well written book about the "miracle" of the sudden migration of millions of monarch butterflies to a little mountain farm in the Appalachians and the ramifications this event has on the people on the farm, the town folks, the scientists who come to study the migration, and mostly the young mother who first discovers the huge, fluttering field of orange. Dellarobia Turnbow is an unhappy, 28 year old mother of two small children, married to her high school sweetheart because they got pregnant. Even though they lost that baby, Dellarobia and her husband, Cub, stayed married and continued living in a small house built on the Appalachian sheep farm of his parents, Bear and Hester. When we first meet Dellarobia she is running away from her marriage...leaving it all behind, including five year old Preston and 18 month old Cordelia. She's headed up the mountain for a rendezvous with a younger man and plans to finally run away and leave behind the life she never wanted to be tied down to. Oh, she apparently loves her children, but it's hard for me to reconcile that when we first meet her completely prepared to ditch them. Anyway, on the way to her rendezvous, Dellarobia stumbles upon a valley of undulating orange...and not just a valley, but every branch of every tree seems to be covered with the mysterious orange hangings. She doesn't know what in the world it is, but she takes it to be a sign that she should not be doing what she's doing and she returns home. When she hears from her husband Cub that his father is thinking of cutting down all the woods above their house to pay for a near-defaulted balloon mortgage on the farm, she suggests that Cub needs to first go and see what is in those woods. After that, things happen pretty quickly with town folk, the preacher, the media and scientists all descending on the area. The orange mass is actually millions of monarch butterflies who have accidentally come to the Tennessee mountains for the winter, instead of to their natural migratory place, Mexico. Soon we meet Ovid Byron, the scientist who sets up camp in a trailer by Dellarobia and Cub's barn, and creates a lab to study the butterflies in a part of that barn. Dellarobia, some of the town folk, and the preacher...and even Dellarobia's very cold, businesslike mother-in-law, all feel that the trees should not be cut down. They feel that nature should not be messed with when God has brought this miracle to their backdoor. They are afraid that Bear will not listen to reason and will destroy the butterflies. Ovid, on the other hand, is more concerned with global warming and what could have possibly caused the butterflies, with hundreds of years of instinct and distinct migratory patterns to suddenly light here. His fears run deeper than cutting down the forest. He's afraid that the cold mountain winter will freeze all the butterflies and completely destroy the species. Though she never went to college, Dellarobia finally finds a subject to spark her intellect and her passion, and for the first time becomes a working mom as Ovid pays her to work every day in the lab and on the mountain. Little Preston is also very interested. He's only in Kindergarten, but smart as a whip and relishes the time that Ovid spends with him. Needless to say, Dellarobia falls for Ovid, or she thinks she does. I think mostly she just finds a fulfillment there of her self-worth that she doesn't find with Cub. Ovid is happily married, though, and never even aware of Dellarobia's feelings. He's only concerned with the butterflies and the significance of this huge event. In the end, Dellarobia and Preston do witness the coupling of a male and female butterfly, even after Ovid said they'd all frozen in the snow. It turns out, huge numbers of them did not freeze and end up flying away in a huge swarm at the very end of the book. But, also by the end of the book, Dellarobia has "found" herself and lets Cub know that she's never been happy. She has a conversation with Preston and tells him they are going to live in the next town with her best friend, Dovey, where there is a college that Dellarobia can attend, thanks to some strings pulled by Ovid. Poor Preston realizes the implications of them leaving his father behind, but as he does the whole story, takes it like a little man. I really don't think I can forgive Dellarobia for telling him all this the day before his birthday. Basically she sits him down to tell him three things: 1) before he was born there was another baby who would have been his older brother who died, 2) oh, but I've got a really great surprise for you for your birthday, you finally get a little computer phone, that we have to share, to look up all your science questions, and 3) but yeah, also we're moving away to live with Dovey and leaving your dad here on the farm. Don't worry, you and Cordie will get to see him. You'll be just like the butterflies migrating back and forth. Huh. I just can't say that Dellarobia is one of my favorite characters a story has ever been written about, but I do have some pangs of sympathy for her. I can't imagine being born and raised in a world so cut off from most of the outside world and having your future be laid out for you with practically no choice. Well, they did make that teenage sex choice, but that stupidity is not singular to a small town Appalachian girl. Oh well. In all, it was a very well written book with lots of wonderful phrases. And, it was deeply moving, probably in a different way for me that it was intended.

Here are a couple of memorable quotes:

They all attended Hester's church, which Dellarobia viewed as a complicated pyramid scheme of moral debt and credit resting ultimately on the shoulders of the Lord, but rife with middle managers.

And the next one, which really resonated with me. Lately I've myself been kind of mourning the lost knowledge of my dad and brother. I mean, there are so many questions I'd like to ask them that I'll never know the answer to. Sigh. Here's the quote:

As a child she'd never thought to ask, and now she would never know. So much knowledge died with a person.