In this book Kingsolver hits you over the head with one agenda or another. I was given this book to read because I told a friend I didn't think Kinsolver liked men. This book didn't prove me wrong. None of the women needed the men in their lives. They were almost entirely attracted to men for sex. If I were a man I would find this book insulting and demeaning. The preachiness of the book totally interferred with any story she was trying to tell. But I don't think she was trying to tell a story, I think she wanted to preach.

I just finished listening to a book on tape of this novel read by the author. It is the most satisfying book I have read in years. The author's knowledge of mountain ecology is amazing. Her poetic way of describing the flora, fauna and people that inhabit her novel bring a corner of the Appalachians sharply into focus and speak volumes about the web of life. The author also manages to gently work women's issues into the book and provides the best description of evolution (not a theory!) I've read.
I love this book. Every thinking woman should read it. Thinking men should read it too if they want to understand women better.

Combining a deep ecologic sensibility with her deft ability to paint a living world scene by scene, Barbara Kingsolver once again graced us with a novel that speaks to both heart and mind. Conflict between preservationist and hunter, organic grower and pro-chemical polemicist, country lore and college lessons -- all play out in the wooded mountains of western Virginia. Fears and pheromones shape lives both domestic and wild, while through it all, seeing but unseen, roam the coyotes. The landscape in this novel is more familiar than that in THE POISONWOOD BIBLE (HarperCollins, 1998) -- particularly to this reviewer living in a woodland that could easily lie just over the ridge from Kingsolver's "Zebulon County." And yet it works in the same way, shaping the characters and the the events, a palpable presence absent from many works of fiction. These people are not just in a place, but clearly of it. There is solitude and communion, bitterness broken by sweet understanding, and everywhere the unrelenting magic of natural selection: each attraction, each decision shaping a future unpredicted by the past. As she explains, "Every quiet step is thunder to beetle life underfoot, a tug of impalpable thread on the web pulling mate to mate and predator to prey, a beginning or an end. Every choice is a world made new for the chosen." The only drawback to a novel so compelling is that the reader is kept up late, or wakened early, to plunge forward -- to reach the ending all too soon. Like a companion cat or dog, these lives are too briefly with us, and then gone; yet who can complain of their effect?