To Fly Again 
 Dellarobia Turnbow is about to take flight when this novel opens. Flight, as in foolish escape. By the end of it, flight has taken a different meaning: the confidence to soar above at least some of the wreckage that life has dealt her. A heartwarming metamorphosis, even though it is set against the background of a deeply-felt warning of ecological disaster. Yes, there are times when Kingsolver can get a tad preachy, but this is personal; the book is set where she herself lives, in the mountains of SE Tennessee. And before it comes even close to becoming an environmental tract, the novel is personal too, centered on a young woman who is, bar none, the most attractive and interesting heroine I have encountered in fiction all year. 
 I do not write as a dyed-in-the-wool Kingsolver fan. I have twice failed with The Poisonwood Bible. I was underwhelmed by The Lacuna. So why should the story of an undereducated young woman living just above subsistence level in Appalachia be any different? Because of Kingsolver's stunning generosity of spirit. Because of her belief in human nature. Because of a religious sympathy that is never simplistic. Her opening chapter is a marvel, though on the surface merely a simple description of a young woman climbing the mountain behind her in-laws' farm for a sexual tryst that will betray her gentle husband and two young children. How effortlessly does the author paint the landscape and fill in the back-story! How closely does she take us into her heroine's heart and dissatisfaction, her desires that show themselves as sexual temptation but may be altogether deeper. How radiantly does she unfold the natural miracle that makes Dellarobia turn back and sets the story in motion. The two chapters that follow--at a sheep-shearing and a church service respectively--are almost equally strong, as is the bittersweet finale which opens with a frightened ewe giving birth in the snow. And everything in between (if you ignore the few passages of environmental or economic preaching) is sheer delight. 
 There are two layers this story. One is the author's fortunately counterfactual premise that the North American population of Monarch butterflies, instead of migrating to Mexico for the winter, come to Tennessee instead. This brings media attention to the valley, inadvertently falling on Dellarobia herself. It also brings a handsome (but married) ecologist named Ovid Byron whose presence inevitably awakens the desires that Dellarobia had buried. But more than that: he also awakens her latent intelligence, gives her a responsible job, and makes her aware that she is capable of more that she has settled for. It is this personal layer that is the true joy for me, especially as Kingsolver doesn't settle for easy stereotyping. Cub, Dellarobia's husband, though passive and intellectually limited, is a kind man. Hester, her dragon mother-in-law, has vulnerabilities of her own that she gradually reveals. Even Bobby Ogle, the charismatic pastor, is refreshingly undoctrinaire. And Dellarobia's personal development does not take place despite her children, but through them; Preston, her inquisitive five-year-old son, may benefit even more from Dr. Byron's influence than his harried mother. 
 Barbara Kingsolver trained as a scientist, and it shows. She reminds me a little of Ann Patchett in her ability to balance the scientific and the personal (and also to repeatedly wrest grace from the jaws of near disaster), but this is an even better book than Patchett's State of Wonder. Some of the themes and the setting of the novel also reminded me of Jonathan Franzen's Freedom, but Kingsolver has a much larger heart. Even without the ecological and social commentary, this would be a novel to reckon with. With it--and even more with the author's ability to look beyond the global to the spiritual--it is a masterpiece.