Flight Behavior, by Barbara Kingsolver

On her way to a desperate assignation, an unhappy wife and mother is stopped in her tracks by a miracle: a mountain ablaze with color and motion, a fire without heat or sound. “Unearthly beauty had appeared to her, a vision of glory to stop her in the road.” Dellarobia thinks that “the burning trees were put here to save her.”

But the miracle that saves her from choosing loss and wreckage as an alternative to a dead-end life is no miracle at all for the monarch butterflies whose light and beauty are its source. Climate change has ruined the Mexican mountains that have been their wintering grounds from time immemorial and brought them to the foothills of southern Appalachia. Here they face almost certain extinction.

Barbara Kingsolver’s novel is about the way Dellarobia’s life and the fate of the butterflies intertwine. Before Dellarobia’s father-in-law can sell the butterfly-covered evergreen trees to loggers, she brings the family up to see what they would be destroying. As the story of her discovery spreads, she becomes a celebrity in her church—the woman Spirit-led to witness a marvelous revelation. At this point it seems that the novel might be about the way a seeming miracle affects the faith and dynamics of a Southern congregation led by an able and compassionate pastor. Kingsolver’s depiction of that pastor, Bobby Ogle, is one of the most sympathetic clergy portraits in recent literature. But very quickly both pastor and church move to the periphery of the story.