In a letter to Codi, Hallie writes, "'What keeps you going isn't some fine destination but just the road you're on, and the fact that you know how to drive.'" This is not a love story as the back of the book may have you believe. Sure, people fall in and out of love within its pages, but this book is really about understanding oneself amid a lifetime of memories and secrets...the risks we take not only when we cheat ourselves, but when we find ourselves, too. I read this for the first time two years ago to the month, needing it for the same reasons even though I've changed a lot, and this time got even a little more from it (which is why we should all read our favorite books multiple times!). I'm not going into a deeply personal reflection here in a public forum, but I think this is a loving book for people who've got some reckoning to do, spanning the greater good of the social and physical world to the individual soul.adult fiction reread-ing111 s Doc Opp460 207

I was a bit disturbed that I could appreciate this book. While I have d a lot of Kingsolver's other work, this particular book is centered around the sort of seriously damaged character that usually turns me off to a book. And had I read this in high school, or college, or maybe even grad school, I'm fairly certain I would have disd it tremendously.

And yet... having read it when I did, I was able to identify with some elements of the what the character was experiencing, even if I didn't approve of her methods with dealing with those issues. And that made the book meaningful to me.

Maybe that's a sign that I'm becoming mature. Let's hope not...

Anyway, the book dances around a lot of issues - touching on corporate malfeasance in environmental impact, the atrocities funded by the U.S. government that the U.S. public does its best to ignore, teenage pregnancy, Alzheimer's disease, the nature of love and friendship, barriers to happiness, and finding meaning in life. Quite a lot of large things for such a small book. And because of that, the book doesn't focus on any one topic enough to really deal with it successfully. It whets your appetite and then goes skimming elsewhere. I would probably have found that annoying, but for the fact that Kingsolver's writing is so fluid that the trip itself is enjoyable, even if you don't end up anywhere. Which mirrors the central message of the book, to the extent that there is one.

Overall, I'm glad I read the book. And while its not the sort of book I'm ly to recommend to anybody, its also not the sort of book I'm ly to steer people away from either. 67 s Cat43 14

This is only the second book that I've read by Barbara Kingsolver, and I'm very interested in learning about her writing process. She has this infectious, cultural curiosity that drives her to learn anything and everything about a place and its people...even if they only exist in her mind. She creates an entire world of history, geography, lineage and folklore.

And every character is filled with so much wisdom and humor that I feel I was given a sneak peak into Kingsolver's personality. Even when her characters are making their mistakes, they are learning and changing. It's as if Kingsolver is teaching a lesson she learned at the same moment she wrote it.

She also has this way of juxtaposing the fiction with real life events. In Animal Dreams, Hallie, a daughter of a tiny canyon village in Arizona keeps her sister, Codi, connected to the war in Nicaragua. Hallie spreads truth and hope with her letters...two subjects that aren't too prominent in Codi's life. 54 s Sara140 50

Let's say you are a completely unlikable medical-school-dropout who's had a somewhat unpleasant but not exactly trauma-worthy childhood who has returned to your hometown to teach biology to a group of poverty-stricken high schoolers while watching over your dad who is slowly sinking into dementia. That would essentially be the perfect time for hanging out at your best-friend-from-high-school's house all day, enjoying the company of her droll children, flirting with your inexplicably devoted Native American boyfriend, saving the town from an evil mining company by spear-heading a pinata-selling fundraiser, writing letters to your twin sister who's campaigning for a better life for the farmers in Central America, and also giving the occasional lecture about birth control to your high schoolers who nominate you for teaching awards and save you from being fired, all while kind of failing to do any actual caring for your father because it turns out the whole town is really hopelessy devoted to him and will do it all for you? Right? Right.This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.Show full review33 s Katherine35 1 follower

this story. Could have done without stereotypical white woman falls in love with super hot native guy because he shows her the meaning of life with his native knowledge or something. I too would to go back to my hometown at 35 and have a super hot native guy waiting there to fall in love with me and put up with all my whining about how no one understands my pain. Other than that I enjoyed the story. books-books26 s Meghan Pinson255 75

My memory, Codi's, is for shit. I have very few memories -- from childhood through this week -- that aren't factually suspect, and thus justifiably subject to correction by others. This is either sad or liberating, depending on my mood and motivation, and provides both impetus for and against the writing down of Real Life. Sometimes the only proof I want is the emotional residue. But sometimes that, too, is inaccurate -- the blinding "pop" in Codi's recurring dream, even the subconscious can get flipped around and rewritten.

Codi's memory has a terrible price when she finally gets hold of it. But then again, she gets to keep Loyd. That should be enough for any girl -- some of us would be wise to choose him over epiphany any day, especially if we're as callous and distant as Codi is throughout most of the novel. It's probably silly to say that the moral of a story is that sometimes life chooses you, since fictional characters are by nature figments of imagination, and get to enjoy the plotting out and tidying up that their authors are wont to do for them. But maybe belief in fiction is an extension of belief in an interventionist God.

Maybe the reason this book left me sobbing and shaken is that it gives the right answer. Isn't that why we read novels -- in the hopes that someone else's imagined life will provide the answers for our own questions? We take books medicine. But medicine, it's still practice ... no one's promising that this time, this cure will work for me, or for you. We can only keep trying for that perfect, elusive match of cure to symptom.This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.Show full reviewfavorites fiction27 s lucky little cat550 111

It's been nearly thirty years since I've read this, and it's amazing which details linger.


Their old shoes were in the attic, arranged neatly by size in a row. As if they'd ever need them again. 4-hanky-weeper and-i-can-t-get-it-out-of-my-head historiche ...more23 s Joy D2,335 262

Protagonist Codi Noline returns to her small hometown in Arizona, after fifteen years, to help her aging father, the town’s doctor, who has been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease. Codi felt an outsider growing up. She and her father are not close. She is hired to teach biology at the local high school and is staying with a friend. She is concerned about her younger sister, Hallie, who has relocated to Nicaragua to assist with agricultural education, at a time when the Contras are engaged in violent civil unrest.

The story is told in alternating perspectives between Codi, in first person, and her father, in third person. If you have read Kingsolver’s books before, you will find familiar territory – environmental activism, beautiful writing about nature, and a strong female protagonist with issues to overcome. In this case, the environment is being threatened by a large corporation harvesting natural resources to use in the manufacturing, while killing the microbiota in the area.

The stark beauty of the American southwestern desert is elegantly evoked, with its ancestral Puebloan dwellings and natural springs. It is a slowly developing novel that relies on many simultaneous threads, including a family secret, a love story, several environmental elements, a willingness to act on one’s beliefs, and a community coming together in a common cause. Kingsolver has crafted these components into a compelling, multi-layered story.
animals family indigenous ...more18 s Dana D.4

This is my favorite Kingsolver novel, and I've re-read it several times, not because it's the best "literature" but because I loved several the characters and some of the imagery... I even named my cat after the main character's sister. Sort of. Anyway, it's readable in a day or two; it's a little preachy and the plot is contrived, but of great sentimental value to me. And the scene of Cody's aging father developing black and white photographs meant to resemble completely unrelated objects really affected me.14 s Elyse449 77

Barbara Kingsolver often has an agenda when she writes her novels. But that's OK with me. They are uplifting and a reminder that we should all get up and DO SOMETHING to make the world a better place. And she does it all with beautiful prose.

In this novel Kingsolver's agenda includes:

US Imperialism: an American woman who is kidnapped in (1980s) Nicaragua by US backed insurgents while she is helping the native farmers;

The Environment: the poisoning of a river in Arizona by tailings from a recently closed mine; and

Incurable Diseases: the sister of the above mentioned woman who returns to her Arizona hometown to help her estranged father who is gradually succumbing to Alzheimers.

Whew. And there is a great love story included too. In future years if I see this book mentioned, I might have forgotten the plot but I will always remember that it was beautifully written.abduction-kidnapped birds environment ...more16 s Sabina23 3

Picked this one up for next to nothing at a garage sale in September along with Sol Yurik's "The Warriors" and S.E. Hinton's "The Outsiders".

The pretty woman in her early 40's refused to sell it to me, instead wanting me to take it for free. I insisted and gave her a buck for all three. She lives in a tiny little pink and turquoise casita around the corner and up the street from my flat which I have always lovingly admired. Now having read the book I feel there was some sort of "Never Ending Story" type connection between her and the protagonist. Something in how she came across an ex-high school teacher, pretty but exhausted, well educated but broke and especially with the combo of these three particular books strewn on a Mexican blanket in her front yard. What can I say..it takes one to know one.

Anyway.

Having read several of Kingsolver's other books I was looking forward to hearing her voice again. I couldn't say it any better than another Good Reads reviewer who says she, "has this infectious, cultural curiosity that drives her to learn anything and everything about a place and its people...even if they only exist in her mind. She creates an entire world of history, geography, lineage and folklore."

Exactly.

And this is why I love Kingsolver. I always come out knowing a place, wanting to walk it's streets or interact with the people she creates. It's just really whole and healthy fiction. It's simple I guess, a good dose of some Kingsolver between some other heavy genre crime, noir or sci-fi always brings me back to being human.

Cause' in the end, that's all I can really be.13 s Jeanne1,092 80

Animal Dreams is a story of loss and blindedness, community and homelessness, family and rejection, passion and hopelessness, set against and in the war in Nicaragua and a man-made disaster set to devastate the small town of Grace, Arizona. Kingsolver is nothing if not ambitious with her themes.

Despite the variety of themes – add on falling in love, self-discovery, belonging, etc. – I never felt lost. Instead, I wanted to move to Grace, where a motherless child could discover that she had 50 mothers, where you could be lost, but taken in by your best friend from high school, where your high school boyfriend might fall in love with you (15 years later). I wanted these often-damaged people as my friends. (Aren't we all damaged to some degree?)

Animal Dreams is a story of firmly-held self-perceptions and worldviews, which can be firmly held and slowly shattered: “We were a bad family. Try to understand. We learned it in school along with the multiplication tables and the fact that beasts have no souls. I could accept the verdict, or I could prove it wrong” (p. 287). Rather than falling apart, we can become whole.

Most of Animal Dreams is told from Codi's perspective, although her dementing father briefly describes his experience, expertly confusing past and present, and her sister Hallie sends missives from Nicaragua, where she has gone as an agricultural consultant. Codi and Hallie were so attached, keenly mismatched Siamese twins conjoined at the back of the mind, so their stories offer fresh and linked perspectives pieces from a single puzzle (p. 8).

Codi's mother died when Hallie was born. Her father, town doctor and quintessential outsider, could not parent his daughters in the way that Hallie, at least, wanted. She wondered,

The strangest thing is that where pain seemed to have anesthetized me, it gave Hallie extra nerve endings. This haunts me. What we suffered in our lives we went through together, but somehow we came out different doors, on different ground levels. (p. 89)

Worldviews are not inevitable consequences of our experience, but they feel inevitable: I’d lost what there was to lose: first my mother and then my baby. Nothing you love will stay (p. 233). Siamese twins experience the same world, but "mismatched Siamese twins" Codi and Hallie, certainly did not. Are their unique experiences the causes of their differing perspectives – or vice versa?

Animal Dreams is also a story of healing, of allowing oneself to love despite your instincts, despite fearing being hurt. Codi "danced" with the population of Grace, passed from one to another, while fervently declaring she could not dance. But our dreams matter, believing that things can be different matters.

“Your dreams, what you hope for and all that, it’s not separate from your life. It grows right up out of it.... If you want sweet dreams, you’ve got to live a sweet life.”
(p. 134)first-nation read-2020 read-women10 s Marialyce 2,078 694

There are some books that absolutely touch your inner being from page one till its very end, and this was one of them. I absolutely loved this book. The way in which Ms. Kingsolver presents her characters and writes is certainly one that shows an easy going momentum of life's options and changes. Our main character, Calli is a woman lost. Coming from a life where she can't seem to find roots, we meet her beloved sister, Hallie, and her cold, unemotional father, Doc Homer. The book is sad and poignant and one that captures a spirit that comes from the midwest Indians and the people of the small town of Grace. Calli needs anchors and doesn't know where to find them. Returning to the town of her youth, one that contains memories that she oftentimes can't remember, she encounters a former boyfriend and they reunite for what is to Calli a convenient liaison. Calli is so afraid of caring that she can't tell what is important, that of the love and care of a man and a town that wants her back. She tries to push away all of those who want to hold her close fearing the point where emotion might kick in and leave her defenseless.

Barbara Kingsolver possess the ability to write in a way that lulls reader into the scenery, the people, and the feelings. Reading her is spending a leisurely afternoon on a hammock. She caresses us with her words that seem to flow so effortlessly. She opened up the world of the Midwest, not with lessons to be learned, but with people who cary within their hearts and minds their culture and their pride. There were so many passages within this book that I wanted to rip out and post around my home.

Calli learns about love in all its forms, from that of her sister Hallie, to a best friend, to a man who cherishes her for who and what she is. SFrom all of this, she finally becomes what she has always wanted, a person who matters, one who finds a place where she is ever so wanted, a person who makes a difference both to herself and those around her.

This book will leave you with lots of feelings, mostly ones that say be happy in everyday, enjoy the life you have, and do stop many times to feel the utter wonder of people who love you and want you forever to be close to them. 11 s2 comments Jeanette (Ms. Feisty)2,179 2,061

An all-around good book. A little heartbreak, a little hope, a little humor, and none of it overdone. Easy to read, but by no means brain candy. There are some very valuable observations woven into the story, nicely understated. Codi's little journey reminds us that the way we remember things may have nothing to do with actual events, and that little things we do for others and for the earth can be important for both the doer and the "doee."

The main character is a tall female me, and I loved some of her comments about how men behave around tall women. Funny!all-fiction four-star-fiction10 s Amy391 47

Barbara Kingsolver has a gift that allows the reader to identify with the land that she is writing about. This story is as much about the main character, Cosima Noline, as it is about her hometown Gracela Canyon, where she grew up and moves back to as a thirty-something. As with Kingsolver's Poisonwood Bible, this story has the characters reflect on their place in the world as individuals as well as in their family, community and workplace. The writing is moving and beautiful. And although I read this is just a couple of days, the story will most ly stay with me for a while. a-good-read10 s Donna4,147 110

This is the 7th book I've read by this author. She falls between 3 and 4 stars for me, but this book was a solid 4 stars for me. I think it's my favorite one so far. I loved the writing more than the actual story. She is great at linking the past with the present. She is also quite expressive with her ideas and with her the descriptive strokes. Some of this was beautifully written and some of it was humorous.

The story line was a little too perfect with a lot of convenient coincidences, but I enjoyed the messages. So 4 stars.contemporary10 s dipandjelly234 5

i reeled so hard when i reached ‘the luckiest person alive’. i’d forgotten that about hallie, even though i’d read the entire book once before, so long ago. i’d forgotten how it ends. i was unprepared for hallie. i forgot about codi getting back on the train. i remembered parts of the book i forgot i’d read, and then remembered specific parts of the book that never even happened at all. kept coming back to what abuelita viola says on the last page. “no, if you remember something, then it’s true… in the long run, that’s what you’ve got.”

the tissue of hearts/the bones in god's backyard/ground orientation/the bread girl.

it was jarring to read this when i did. it is perpetually jarring to be reading this even as i watch the hills in my backyard being bulldozed and cut down and razed to the ground for the 'development' of the city. it is intimately jarring to watch the prolific growth of condos. ""what is all this for? What is the hunger that drives this need?" i think it's fear. codi."

to say nothing of... let me just not even touch upon loyd. loyd doesn't need saying. there's just that one part of the book that does it all for me.
"no offense, codi, but i didn't give up cockfighting to impress you. I did it because you were right.

kept coming back to codi and how eerily familiar her voice is. something out of my own head. something i've already lived through. kingsolver keeps on bringing to the forefront, keeps on saying things you know you've thought about but didn't know you had inside of you. i kept thinking, this is the kind of book you don’t just sit down to read or even to write. this is the kind of book you live through and live to. it felt i’d been reading this book, so slowly, living through it, in it, in the hopes that it would end in something that would move through me what codi calls 'an earthquake of the soul’. it didn’t. it mostly just ended the way she ends it. something finite coming to an end. quietly. requiring patience and hope. homero insists that hope is dangerous because it requires giving so much of yourself. codi insists that you give it anyway. hallie calls her hope the hope for 'elementary kindness.’ it ended exactly how it was meant to, and exactly how i was unprepared for it to: quietly, on its own.

i can’t explain in words what this book did to me and for me. i’m still working through that. but it’s a haze has suddenly lifted. for the first time in a long time, i began something and it was exactly what i needed - albeit was completely unprepared for.

(i can't objectively review this beyond the fact that it's driving me nuts that google has this book listed under 'romance novel'... thanks for completely missing the plot, google. thanks.)2016-favourites forever-kind-of-book women-s-writing9 s Jeffrey Taylor228 1 follower

The book was interesting light reading, easy to read; not very demanding. Overall, however, I found it disappointing.

An essential quality of a novel is its ability to take us into the consciousness of another person. In that respect Kingsolver succeeds. Codi is a feminine, anti-hero. Kingsolver takes us into all of Codi's doubts and misgivings. We experience the broken and the whole moments of her life.

Unfortunately there are unexplored and incomplete elements in Codi's life that are not fully developed in Codi's story We are left shielded from the experience that took her from her dream of becoming a doctor to becoming a seven and eleven clerk. Was it a traumatic experience, there are hints of this, or was it her self doubts? Codi is damaged as a child by the loss of her mother and the remoteness of her father. This theme is never resolved to my satisfaction. She explores it when Codi returns to Grace but never comes to grips with it, or with grace for that matter.

Codi is the catalyst for the events that save Grace but the activists are others. She in tangentially involved but stand on the sidelines.

Cody's childhood is most dramatically effected by her relationship with her sister and her loss of her first child due to miscarriage. This sense of loss is never explored as our only contact with her sister is letters from the wings of the stage after she goes of to Guatemala. My feeling of disappointment was fueled by the impression that Kingsolver was telling us the wrong story,Codi's story rather than her sister's story. Although Cody reestablishes her relationship with Loyd I never got that feeling that this marked Cody's recovery of loss or of grace. I was impressed with the feeling of interiority that Kingsolver created, we experienced Codi's rekindling relationship and felt the interplay of love and doubt as the relationship deepened. I was fascinated by the revelations of Indian culture and Codi's place in that culture. I wished that had been explored further.

The story was good and had great potential. It could have been far better had Kingsolver done a better job as an author in handling the fascinating themes she created.9 s1 comment ? ? Tima ? ? ?397 22

This book was captivating. Kingsolver has a rare gift of painting emotion with every word. She does not spend pages writing detailed descriptions of a character's face; she spends a novel intertwining characters personalities. You can feel the passion, the heavy sadness; you can see the world in which this story lives. She wrote so beautifully of Native American life, modern city life, loss in many ways (loss of body, mind, feeling, family) but also of gaining all those things back in a true-to-life format.

I could not put this book down. It is the story of Cosima [Codi] returning to her small, environmentally-threatened town of Grace, Arizona. Where she must deal with her distant father's worsening Alzheimer's, seeing the high-school sweetheart whose baby she miscarried without his knowledge and confront the rush of long-lost memories of childhood that consume her. It is the story of loss, of re-discovering a place she thought was lost to her, family secrets coming to light..

The story is also told through the eyes of Cosima's ailing father, Homero. His sections are brief but poetic, beautifully pained, delicate and encompassing.


Favorite quotes of the book:

1). "You don't ask questions of an attic"

2.) "[...] There was a roaring in my ears and I lost track of what they were saying. I believe it was the physical manifestation of unbearable grief."

3). "The flowers were beaten down, their bent-over heads bejeweled with diamond droplets earring on sad, rich widows"
4-stars genre-realistic-fiction read-in-20129 s Jill Hyesun Wasberg54

This was pretty silly. I loved Poisonwood Bible and Prodigal Summer, and this was promising, with complex themes of environmental ethics and international social justice issues. I thought the narration (first person, mid-thirties female who teaches high school biology in her tiny southwestern hometown) was so trite and annoying! I think Barbara Kingsolver is a talented writer, so I'm not sure what happened here.

Much of the story was about Codi, the narrator, coming to terms with coming to the home that she felt always treated her an outsider because she was tall and smart--this is what I gathered from the two qualities of herself on which she was fixated throughout the story-- but nowhere in the story is it indicated that she was treated as such. The opposite, in fact. She finds out boys in high school were intimidated by her beauty and aloofness so much so that their nickname for her was "Empress"; her high school students vote her as the best teacher in their high school because she acts one of the kids and curses in class and draws penises on the blackboard; the boy she loved in high school is now madly in love with her and wants her to marry him, but she's just too damaged from their past to settle.

Eesh, even as I write this, I feel I'm summarizing a Sweet Valley High book! Come on, Barbara. What is the deal with this book? book-club9 s1 comment Laurel134 34

I was surprisingly happy with the ending of this book, but the problem was the rest of it. Throughout, I found myself feeling there was something missing about Codi. Or at least something *I* was missing. I understood that she was troubled, but I couldn't figure out if I d her anyway. I understood that she was working through her issues, but I couldn't decide if she was taking too long or not taking long enough. I understood that she loved her sister, but I couldn't tell if the relationship was healthy.
Yeah, let's talk about Hallie. Again, I was happy with the ending - well, obviously I was sad for Codi that she died, I'm not saying I was happy because of that. I'm just happy that Hallie got knocked off of her pedestal a bit because of what she wrote in her letters. You know, how Codi realizes that Hallie was actually doing this whole Nicaragua thing for herself, too, to give herself a point in life? I was glad she came to that realization. Codi idolized Hallie to the point that I was annoyed. I was , "Please, I don't want to hate Hallie but I kind of do just because of your biased memories of her."
Speaking of memories, I was a little skeptical that Codi could block out all memories from before she was fifteen and not even realize it until she returned to Grace and people were bringing them to her attention - and she still didn't remember. Does that happen to people? You don't even KNOW you've blacked out half of your memories?
Anyway. I d the different aspects of the book, but I thought they were a little disjointed. Her transitions between the book's plot lines were abrupt and I lost something in the movement, and in the rapid passage of time. Codi spent a lot of time thinking - a lot of time looking - and a lot of time explaining what she did that brought her to the thinking and the looking. Granted, I appreciate a bit of that; sometimes I don't want to see pointless scenes. But other times I do, you know? Other times I would to have Codi take her time spending a night in the city rather than thinking, "Oh, I spent a night in the city. Here's a deep thought I had about it."
I was really skeptical of her relationship with Loyd. When I first was introduced to the prospect of Loyd, it was as the father of the dead child that disturbed her enough to block out her memories, give her the image of herself that she's inadequate compared to her sister, and haunt both her and her father. Not to mention, she acted Loyd never mattered! She never said if she did or didn't love him/want him/feeling anything toward him, even anger...and then he appears and we're supposed to accept that deep down she loves him already. MEH. I d his love for her better, but I wasn't buying that her history led HER to this guy, of all people. When she first met up with him, I really thought it was going to be about her getting over this guy's role as her dead baby's father...yet that didn't really appear to be her issue with him. It was more about other things, whether she could decide to love any guy enough to make Grace her home. That was fine, but why with the father? And it wasn't really resolved in the end - she's just , "Oh, I told Loyd about the baby. He was sad. I didn't think he'd be sad." WHAT. That's all you get? That's all that story gets? I repeat: "He's sad." WHAT?
Don't get me wrong. I d Loyd's character; I d his back story and his culture and his personality. I was rooting for him. I just don't this past that clashes awkwardly with the "new" Loyd the READER came to know.
As a whole, I d the themes in the book. I'm not a HUGE environmentalist, but I felt myself really caring about the environmental issues the book brings up. Especially the native American ideas about land and respecting nature; some of my favorite parts were the bits where Loyd explains that culture.
I'm sorry to say that I didn't know anything about the Nicaraguan Revolution or the contras. I was confused for a while. (I googled it, though.) Maybe if I had read this in 1990, when it first came out, I would be better equipped to place myself in a position to really care for Hallie's cause, but unfortunately, I was born approximately two decades after that started. It's 2016 now, and whatever is going on in Nicaragua, it's not making front page news - maybe that's ignorant of me to say, but it's the truth, okay? (Actually, the first thing I found on what is going on there now had the headline "Nicaragua Prospers Under an Ex-Guerrilla.") Regardless, it was a little difficult to truly grasp what was going on there until I looked it up...after the fact. So maybe I missed something there.
Moving on.
Kingsolver has beautiful writing. That's all. It's just pretty.
I can't decide if I how...grand she tries to be. There are a lot of things that were MESSAGES. , you were supposed to read them and glean some greater knowledge. That was fine...until it got to be so many messages that it felt the whole book was a bunch of wise words. With some colorful characters thrown in.
Characters. I was a reasonably disturbed by Homer's decline. I loved Evelina and the Stitch and Bitch club, despite how I was really hesitant about them both. The thing was that Grace as a whole was introduced I was supposed to be annoyed with it's small-town traits, but then I realized that no, I was supposed to love it. Wait, CODI was supposed to love it. It made me a little confused.
On the whole, I kept thinking I knew where this book was going. I kept thinking I could see what Kingsolver was setting up, what she wanted me to think of people/places, what she thought were the important bits. By the end, I just let it wash over me, bits falling in and out of importance, and that was a better strategy.
So I'd say this is a solid mediocre book. I'm glad I read it. Would I rave? No. But I appreciate what it was going for.8 s Ms.pegasus749 164

American exceptionalism was not fueled by some unique spiritual vigor. It was a frighteningly efficient juggernaut powered by the ability to destroy, forget, and move on. That is what Hallie realizes and tells her sister Codi: “She said we were a nation in love with forgetting the facts.” (p.61) That truth strikes Codi, her older sister by a mere three years, as Loyd shows her the land – his land, the land of the Apache, Navajo and Pueblo. She muses: “To people who think of themselves as God's houseguests, American enterprise must seem arrogant beyond belief. Or stupid. A nation of amnesiacs, proceeding as if there were no other day but today. Assuming the land could also forget what had been done to it.” (p.240)

Kingsolver embeds this idea in a thoughtful and at times intense exploration of personal loss. Her setting is a remote Arizona settlement named Grace. It is an American anomaly, drawing its identity from its continuity. The fruit orchards are ancient. The wild peacocks are descendants of the pets that nine girls, scarcely emerged from childhood, brought with them from Spain. They had been betrothed to gold miners. The descendants of these nine blue-eyed Gracela sisters have the same startling eyes, and intermingled family bloodlines. On November 2, the Day of All Souls, these descendants unite to commemorate their long dead family members and decorate their graves.

But Grace is dying. The evidence is in the orchards. Fruit falls prematurely from the trees. The evidence is in the water. Leaching chemicals have acidified the river killing off its microscopic biomes. Now, exploiting an environmental loophole, the Black Mountain Mining Company plans to divert the river. Without the river, the land is finished. Seasonal rains will no longer slake its thirst. “The river was Grace's memory of water.” (p.269)

Grace is the birthplace off Codi and Hallie Nolina. Codi has returned, ostensibly to help their father Doc Homer who is suffering from Alzheimers. Her arrival is a reminder of her own losses.

Memory and the emotions that accompany loss are the heart of this novel. Codi has spent the past 15 years forgetting. Their mother died when she was three. Their emotionally repressed father tried to mold his young daughters with the control he exerted over the photographic images he developed as a hobby. Codi is unsettled to hear stories of her childhood from people she grew up with, stories half-erased that hover in amorphous limbo in her dreams. “Those things didn't seem so much the actual memories as things I might remember from a book I'd read more than once.” (p.11) Even her sister Hallie is surprised by what she has forgotten. The one memory she never shared with Hallie, the one she cannot forget, is of the miscarriage she suffered when she was fifteen.

Kingsolver intersperses Codi's story with Doc Homer's own memories now detached from time. His present is rapidly unraveling into a hallucinatory past. His memories are more accurate than Codi's, and are saturated with the emotions he withheld at the time. That silence along with his need to feel in control explains much of the estrangement that grew between him and his daughters.

Hallie is Codi's anchor. She has found the connection she wanted in Nicaragua, applying her knowledge of agronomy to help the villagers feed themselves. However, the narrative follows Codi's much more uncertain path. She thinks of herself as an alien in the village, someone who never fit in. Yet, as a temporary middle school biology teacher she finds connection with the rambunctious adolescents. Later, she is drawn into a feisty sewing circle of old women who call themselves the Stitch and Bitch Club. Their primary fundraiser is creating pinatas using the peacock feathers they have collected throughout the year. Codi's passion energizes these women into a community bent on saving the town. With hesitation, she even forms a connection with Loyd, who displays a surprisingly profound view of life based on many of the losses he, too, experienced.

The pace of this novel is slow, but it gathers momentum a river receiving the bounty of its tributaries.

NOTES:
Review and interview that place the novel in the context of its time: https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytim...fiction the-american-west8 s Samidha; ?????674

This book wrecked me.
When I first read the 30% of the book I had absolutely no feelings for the main character, even though it was written in first person.
I just read it because I loved the way Kingsolver took time to creat and portray her environment, as well as setting.
The last 30% of the book was massively different from the first one. And I think that's when my perspective on this novel changed.


It's a brilliant piece of work, that needs to be read slowly and cherished fully - to finally grasp what wonderful emotions and histories, the author has woven into the pages.
american-lit books-i-own cover-is-love ...more8 s Kelly32 3

This is far and away my favorite book. Yes, asking an avid reader to choose a favorite is asking a parent to choose a favorite child, I know. But this book. This is the book that made me start re-reading things. This is the book that feels it was written about my life. This book combines so many things - familial relationships and how we navigate them as we age, losing loved ones, suffering in private, moving back home as an adult, fears of all shapes and sizes, romantic relationships, animal cruelty, sustainability, railroads, and the feeling of belonging - through beautiful, thoughtful prose and letters. This is a book that I didn't want to share for a long time because it was so good and felt a peek into my own soul and I was afraid that when others read it, they'd realize that. This is the book that Barbara Kingsolver herself came perilously close to throwing away, in an elliptically long moment of self-doubt.
I love this book and I love it more every time I read it, which has maybe been 6 or 7 times by now. I wanted to read it last year, but was in Indonesia and couldn't find a Kindle version. So, when I came to Ireland and stumbled upon it in the library, I decided to quickly read it again, before classes started and I got bogged down in linguistic textbooks. It didn't disappoint. Reading this book is finding your soul mate - you didn't feel incomplete before, but after you find it, you don't know how you could've been complete before. 6 s Chitrangi143 5

I am feeling a very eerie sort of calm now. But I also feel my throat still choked up, the way it does when you want to suppress your tears.

I will have to read it again, much slowly the next time, because I feel I did no justice to the book by reading it the way I did. Codi's voice was too disturbingly similar. At the end of it all, however, I cant help but wonder if I could do what she did - jump on that train, despite or because of everything that transpired through the text. I wonder if I will have the courage to make that choice, knowing that it would be permanent. Of course, it is redundant for me to ask myself that now but that is the prevalent thought on my mind.

'The Luckiest Person Alive' tore me. Perhaps, I should have kept it for another day, a day I would emotionally be better equipped to read that chapter. I didn't want to believe it. I kept expecting her to come back, to just show up in Grace.

This will be one of those texts I will keep going back to whenever things get too difficult for me. But I'm definitely going to do a re-read of it in September, when I go back to India.will-hug-to-death wrecked-me6 s Lisa Roberts1,612 3

This book is really about understanding oneself amid a lifetime of memories and secrets...the risks we take not only when we cheat ourselves, but when we find ourselves, too. It covers a lot of territory and while this may look a laundry list of boring topics, it’s not, and many of these are slightly touched upon while others are delved into and are part of what makes up Codi, our narrator and main character: corporate interference and environmental impact, cock fighting, family issues, the atrocities funded by the U.S. government in Nicaragua, teenage pregnancy, Alzheimer's disease, the nature of love and friendship, barriers to happiness, memories, and finding meaning in life. Codi must address all of these issues in order to move forward with her life. It's a little preachy and the plot is contrived, but it is meaningful especially for me at this age (almost 50). audio birthday-celebration6 s molly rae57

Okay, so this wasn't the most intellectually demanding book. But why do books necessarily have to challenge you in order to be great?? Also, I sort of disagree that this is just a sentimental/brain candy-esque book. Kingsolver is undoubtedly a beautiful writer, and there were also some profound messages to be found throughout the narrative.

Some of my favourite lines: "The tears stream out until the afghan is wet and he thinks there will be no more fluid in them to run the blood cells through their veins. He makes them drink orange juice. God, why does the mortal man have children? It is senseless to love anything this much.” I mean, that's kind of beautiful. Something about how she puts words together blew me away -- there was one line, I can't find it now, where she describes a woman as being "graceful and cold", and that just struck me. I don't know. I the combination of certain words. Even in that line -- orange juice and senseless love. Just a cool juxtaposition of words, right?

Or this -- ". . . the very least you can do in you life is to figure out what you hope for. And the most you can do is live inside that hope. Not admire it from a distance but live right in it, under its roof." At the end of the story, (without giving too much away), I think that Kingsolver's main character, Codi, learns to live inside her own hope for her life, and to give into it -- even though that's a really scary thing. Anyway. There were vivid characters, a great love story, and beautiful writing -- so I was overall sold. C u next time!! 6 s1 comment Cheri477 6

This is a wonderful book. It does what many stories try to do: it simply tells a person's life, a snippet of time in the grand scheme of things, and in the process touches on some larger truth. Something that helps a reader with a new perspective, a new thing to think about.

Many stories try to do this. Most fail to do it thoroughly.

But Animal Dreams does it. It is pierced through with sorrow and love and loss and growth, all wrapped up in one special town that most see as a place to move from. Many have left Grace; few return.

And yet Codi comes back, the prodigal daughter, suitcase heavy with fear, alienation, loneliness, and aimlessness. She is un-rooted, and tugged by memories she can and cannot remember. This is a story of finding oneself, of coming together inside your own skin. Of becoming.

Codi holds most of the pages, but some of the most devastating passages are from the few chapters told from her father's point of view. He is how she could be. How we all can be, if we feel but don't let it out, if we hide behind histories long past but still capable of wounding.

My favorite paragraph: "...people's dreams are made out of what they do all day. The same way a dog that runs after rabbits will dream of rabbits. It's what you do that makes your soul, not the other way around."

I'll be reading more Kingsolver.general-fiction6 s Mimi1,649

While I intellectually understand that The Poisonwood Bible is Kingolver's Magnum Opus, this is the one I brought when I had the opportunity to have her inscribe one of my books (swoon!)
This is such a beautiful story of reframing your story in adulthood, love, parenthood, and who we are. I had forgotten how much the environment was involved and had forgotten how much of the politics of Nicaragua got into the story, but they were both relevant and well done.
There are so many brilliant lines that I found that I had underlined throughout. It definitely remains in my top ten.read-20184 s Carmen2,456

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