“Flight Behavior” by Barbara Kingsolver

Book Review by Meredith McKinnie

“A certain feeling comes from throwing your good life away, and it is one part rapture. Innocence was no part of this. She knew her own recklessness and marveled, really, at how one hard little flint of thrill could outweigh the pillowy, suffocating aftermath of a long disgrace.”

Barbara Kingsolver’s novels regularly top the bestseller lists, as she’s written consistently since 1988. Her works explore the relationships between people and their communities. A masterful storyteller, Kingsolver’s attention to space and place captures readers through intricately woven stories of relatable characters frequently on the margins. Kingsolver explores this dynamic of belonging, but not quite fitting, in her 2012 novel Flight Behavior. 

In the opening scene, Dellarobia, a married mother of two, is climbing up the family mountain to meet a man who is not her husband, intent on leaving her confining life behind. For the last 11 years, she has lost herself in being everything for everyone else and has come to resent her role in this family-in-law. In a bad marriage with a good man, Dellarobia feels hopeless. Suddenly Dellarobia comes upon a mass of butterflies, millions fluttering around the family property, a luminous and stunning sight that thwarts her plan of escape. Displaced due to environmental changes, the butterflies migrate to Tennessee in lieu of their normal Mexican winter refuge. The media attention ensues, bringing scientists and spectators to the otherwise ignored Appalachian town. Themes of religion, interpersonal family dynamics, climate change discourse, and class converge in this story of retaining individuality in a traditional rural community. 

Kingsolver’s narrative skill surfaces through intriguing dialogue, laced with social commentary that represents diverse viewpoints. While the climate change debate is at the heart of this novel, Kingsolver showcases the immediacy of those regions severely impacted by environmental changes. While the people of this fictional town depend on the land for survival, they also view their livelihoods as legacies, tethering identity and career in a way that makes each decision transformational. While the outsider climate activists tell them what they should do to protect the migrating butterflies, it compromises a way of life that has sustained the family for generations. The push-and-pull between what’s right and who is right is stretched and shifted throughout the story, showing the issue is more nuanced than many understand. 

As an environmentalist, Kingsolver writes with respect for the land, but even more so for the people inhabiting those spaces. People and place cannot easily be separated, and a shifting dynamic in one case inevitably affects the entire ecosystem. Kingsolver’s engaging story reminds readers that humans are fallible, complex, and often driven by emotion, that sometimes the most logical choice accompanies potentially dire outcomes. 

“As long as we won’t commit to knowing everything, the presumption is we know nothing. He did not claim that God moves in mysterious ways. Instead, he seemed to believe, as she did, though they never could have discussed it, that everything else is in motion while God does not move at all. God sits still, perfectly at rest, the silver dollar at the bottom of the well, the question.”