Prodigal Summer

Published in 2000, Prodigal Summer is Barbara Kingsolver’s fifth novel. Heavily influenced by Kingsolver’s childhood experiences and current home in Appalachia, as well as her studies of ecology and evolutionary biology, Prodigal Summer tells three intersecting stories that take place over one “prodigal summer” in rural Appalachia. Set in the fictional Zebulon County, Prodigal Summer is as much a story of the natural world, and its progression over one fertile and flowering summer, as it is the tale of its human characters.

The first of Prodigal Summer’s three storylines centers on Deanna Wolfe, a ranger in the Zebulon National Forest who spent her childhood in Zebulon County before marrying and teaching in the city, then returning to Zebulon to live alone in a cabin on the mountainside. As the novel begins in late spring, Deanna is tracking a coyote—an animal she has a particular passion for, and chose as the subject of her graduate school thesis—when she’s surprised by a hunter, Eddie Bondo. Eddie is the son of a sheep farmer from Wyoming, and has come to Zebulon with the express purpose of hunting coyotes—the same animals that threaten his family’s farm. Eddie is also twenty years younger than Deanna, and “half a head shorter” (27).