Barbara Kingsolver's "Flight Behavior" - NYTimes.com Climate change, for every good and topical reason, headlines Barbara Kingsolver's marvelous eighth novel. But not to be undersold are its characters, rendered so believably and affectionately, they warm the atmosphere on their own. Dellarobia Turnbow is a fitfully married young farm wife in rural Tennessee, and as delightful and sympathetic a heroine as a reader could custom order. After a shotgun wedding at 17 she's tied to the kindly enough Cub, in every way not her equal. Now, at 28, she has two children, and they are still together out of duty and the gift of a house to live in. Dellarobia, "a woman with flame-colored hair," once knew "the power of being physically admired, changing the energy of a room by walking into it." Her best friend, Dovey, a faithful sender of waggish texts, brings out her caustic best. Despite her cynical eye and hardscrabble life, Dellarobia is nonetheless loyal to her region and sensitive to what a visitor calls "the condescension of outsiders." One afternoon, heading uphill "to meet her demise" in the form of a tryst with a near-stranger, she sees tree branches writhing and aglow with millions of orange monarch butterflies covering the mountainside. Unearthly beauty had appeared to her, a vision of glory to stop her in the road. For her alone these orange boughs lifted, these long shadows became a brightness rising. It looked like the inside of joy, if a person could see that. A valley of lights, an ethereal wind. It had to mean something. To Dellarobia, the swarms are a warning - go home, don't cheat - but the devoted of Feathertown see a miracle and want a piece of the action. A Bible class dropout "tainted with doubt" and pining for the college education her teen marriage thwarted, Dellarobia is drawn to science and its practitioners, at odds with her neighbors, who believe weather and its accompanying phenomena to be the Lord's business. As first witness to the butterfly invasion she finds herself the talk of the town. Internet attention brings tourists to her mountaintop and her doorstep, eco-sightseers with cameras "whose very shutter clicks sounded expensive." It also brings the entomologist Ovid Byron, whose professional passion is monarch butterflies and their distressing new migration patterns. He is taller, smarter and possessed of social skills not seen in Turnbow men: handsome, Harvard educated, African-American with a lilting Virgin Islands accent, and named after poets. "Like Bob Marley's cute brother that avoided substance abuse and got an education," Dellarobia tells Dovey. His is more than a drop-in visit. He moves onto the Turnbow sheep farm, sets up a trailer, builds a lab in the barn, hires Dellarobia as an assistant and brings in a crew of graduate students to analyze the butterflies and their dislocation, which he sees as "a symptom of vast biological malignancies." As the months go by, as unseasonal rain and snow take their toll, with hurricanes "reaching a hundred miles inland, wind speeds we've never seen," Ovid is riled into an on-air diatribe by a wonderfully smug TV reporter. "Scientists used to call these things the canary in the mine," he declares. What they say now is The canary is dead. Ms. Kingsolver was a biologist before she was an author and is still a farmer and resident of Appalachia. "Flight Behavior" is ambitious in its scope, marrying Dellarobia's wisenheimer worldview with danger of the huge, immutable kind. Do global warming and intimations of doomsday tax the storytelling at times? But they share these pages with smaller-scale, deliciously human moments. Without overreaching she delivers line after line that can be at once beautiful, casual, wry, offbeat. Whether she is describing Dellarobia's malcontented, ambitious in-laws or the environmentally earnest rubberneckers or Feathertown's rumpled young preacher, she never employs, as she says of one character, the "ordinary tools of contempt." Dellarobia's 5-year-old son, Preston, is the child with a future that his mother had hoped for herself: not only beloved but encouraged for his endearingly dweeby and scholarly ways, "set apart by a devotion to his own pursuits that was brave and unconforming." Her husband is an amusingly lumpen and literal-minded presence, though still a good egg. Heading out on an errand, for once without Preston and his baby sister, she tells Cub: "Here we are on a date. Right back where we started from. "Not really," he murmurs. Truck's got a different engine. She describes her toddler's fleecy hair as having "a center part so crooked it could get you a DUI." And, about a recurring extramarital temptation: "The way he looked at her suggested he'd be willing to bring her golden apples, or the Mississippi River." At first glance Dellarobia believed the "the burning trees were put there to save her." And they do. Her small, housebound existence expands and improves after the freakish appearance of the butterflies. As her son blossoms, as science moves in next door, she is changed, emboldened. And yet: "Why did the one rare, spectacular thing in her life have to be a sickness of nature"? This is fiction rich in empathy, wit and science. Like the butterflies that astonish Feathertown, Kingsolvian gifts are "fierce and wondrous," "colors moving around like fire." Elinor Lipman's 10th novel, "The View From Penthouse B," and an essay collection, "I Can't Complain," will be published in April.