Tiny Review: Flight Behavior

Flight Behavior by Barbara Kingsolver
My rating: 1 of 5 stars

I did not like this at all. The writing was painfully self-conscious and felt forced, awkward, grandstanding. I kept waiting and waiting and searching for a reason to feel something for the main character Dellarobia. She felt flat and unrelatable. Kingsolver spent so much time building up these small parts of her personality - her smoking addiction for example- just to suddenly drop them in unrealistic ways. Oh yeah, she quit a bunch of chapters ago. I'll mention it in passing in the past now. The whole story was told as reflections of things that happened. We rarely get to be there for the moment, just hear the ongoing reflections of the things that happened. And this remove makes everything feel removed. There's an important point that Kingsolver seemed to be trying to make: climate change feels distant and unrelatable when your immediate needs are so pressing. We have worlds within worlds within our own country, without a lot of overlap and common ground. Or at least, we've forgotten (if we ever knew) how to see and find that common ground. This book should have been nonfiction essays, because its a huge and important issue.

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