Valia Estep and her big-haired daughter Crystal both looked at their hands, and so did the two Norwood ladies. The six of them surrounded the table evenly like numbers on a clock, but with more hands, all reaching inward rather than out. Dellarobia stood across from her mother-in-law at the skirting table where they worked with four other women, picking over the white fleece spread out between them. The shorn fleeces were dry enough to be skirted while still warm off the sheep. Stray motes of fleece flecked the beams of light streaming from the high windows, and the day smelled mostly of lanolin rather than urine and mud. After all the months of dampness, the air inside the barn now seemed unnaturally dry. As far as Dellarobia could remember, no autumn shearing had been so pleasant. The chore of turning ninety ewes and their uncountable half-grown lambs through the shearing stall became a day's good work instead of the misery expected by all. On the strength of that and nothing more, just a few degrees of temperature, the gray clouds scurried away to parts unknown like a fleet of barn cats. On shearing day the weather turned cool and fine. As Dellarobia soon learns, the flames were actually monarch butterflies whose migration was thrown off by environmental devastation and weird weather (and which appeared flame-like because she'd left her glasses at home). She'd been hiking through the woods to meet a lover, a tryst she abandons after her near-religious experience.

In the excerpt, Dellarobia is still thinking about the strange vision she'd witnessed the day before, of 'a mighty blaze rising from ordinary forest' but not consuming it. This exclusive excerpt exhibits one of the book's pleasures - Kingsolver's closely observed depictions of rural life - as it introduces the main characters. Kingsolver mixes a story of personal awakening with themes of environmental stewardship and climate change as a freak natural phenomenon begins to transform Dellarobia's life. How?ĭellarobia Turnbow, the smart-mouthed heroine of Barbara Kingsolver's Flight Behavior, is frustrated by her marriage to Cub, the boy who got her pregnant in high school, and by the grinding privation of life on her in-laws' failing farm. Your purchase helps support NPR programming. Close overlay Buy Featured Book Title Flight Behavior Author Barbara Kingsolver

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