Animal Dreams

The ‘crime’ in Animal Dreams is a legal technicality, and this is a literary contemporary novel rather than a crime one, but its narrative drive comes from the same need to untangle the past to set the characters free (or as free as they can be) in the present.

The writing is glorious – rich, deep, surprising, layered – reaching levels of technical mastery that few other writers even glimpse. There are several point-of-view characters and, unlike most books with this structure, Kingsolver wrings every last drop of drama and interest from the nuances this offers.

Instead of longing to… show more.

I’ve read Animal Dreams eight times, and each time I connect with the protagonist, Codi, as strongly as I did the first time. Codi is returning home to Grace, Arizona, partly because she has no idea what to do with her life, partly because her father isn’t well, and partly because she has unfinished business to tend to, though she doesn’t let herself acknowledge that. She’s an expert at running away from the truths she’s buried and the people who could expose them, but her façade shatters when she returns to Grace, a world barren and fertile and unforgettable. Why… show more.