I enjoyed learning about the Monarch Butterfly and it's migration pattern. I didn't really think the story surrounding it was very interesting.

I loved her book "The Poisonwood Bible" but that's the only other one I've read. This was not nearly as good.

No.

Really nothing special about this book. I would not recommend it to friends.

I waited a long time before I got this book. It looked interesting but without a little more detail, I should have known better. It took several starts but I finally got through it. I am not an environmentalist but I know there are some things that humans are responsible for messing up in this world. I don't like to read a book for enjoyment and find a lecture on how we are ruining the earth. Maybe it is true, maybe not, but don't expect me to enjoy a lecture when I am looking for an enjoyable story.

As the main character learns about the butterflies, she discovers herself.

I was raised in the north so I'd like to have seen a more realistic approach to dressing for the weather, tromping around in cold and snow.

Kingsolver has such a sense of place. She knows the lives, the social problems and the strengths of the people of Appalachia. Since she herself reads the work, she does the local accents so well.

Taking wing

I agree with critics who have called the work a bit preachy on environmental/ecology/education issues, but it is still a wonderful read, and I cared about the main characters.

It's a very important novel about real world concerns about climate change. Slow to get into but worth the effort.

While a novel, the story educates one about the monarch butterflies flight and plight as well as the world's current precarious hold.

Read by the author makes it a bit more special.

I loved this. I work in a climate-related field and I really appreciated how she embedded science in a completely engaging story. Yes, it was ever so slightly didactic, but the emotional truth-telling more than made up for it, as planetary change whirled individual lives into larger patterns and brought different segments of society together. It worked well as an audiobook because each moment and scene stood on its own, and the slower pace than reading allowed me to savor the fine word choices. Never did I have to try to remind myself who a character was or where they fit into the plot. Kingsolver's voice also turns out to be perfectly pitched and paced to read her own work. I loved it. Did I say that?

I was hesitant to read this book, in spite of the positive reviews. It seated on my wish list for a while. Every time I had to choose a book, I would glance at it, read its description and would eventually move down the list and listen to another one. The reviews were positive, but I just couldn't conjure up the fact that a book dealing with climate change could be interesting. I finally gave it a try and just loved the story from the beginning to the end. Yes, it deals with hard science and religious believes without being preaching, but showing truly compassion to the world and others. The analogies are something else, subtle and profound at the same time.

The main character's wisdom makes the reader (listener) see the world through her lonely and loving heart.

The narrator, Barbara Kingsolver, is the true soul of this story. In fact, I am trying to find other books narrated by her.

The book makes you wonder whether we sometimes forget that behind facts, science, religious beliefs there are human beings flighting from a place inside them no one else knows.

Yes, but only with a different narrator.

There is a tremendous opportunity for a professional performer to narrate this story. It is beautifully written and tells a wonderful story. However, choosing the author as the narrator provides no assets to its performance and enjoyment. The question is: can one finish the story before getting too annoyed at the reading style? This is a similar problem with the last book by Ms. Kingsolver.

This is a story that lives on its own but also gets its message across. It tells of the growth and rebirth of one woman as she comes to understand the much larger phenomenon she discovers in her own back yard.

Dellarobia is the vessel through which we see a small world become magical and then complex and troubled. Just as the butterflies she finds struggle to survive, she struggles to do something more than just survive. She is delightfully real - selfish and self-sacrificing, irritating and funny, ignorant and smart as a whip. Kingsolver teaches a class here on how to draw a living, breathing Southern spitfire.

Yes, although I think the audiobook would have been even better with a professional narrator.

Kingsolver fans will know that her endings are usually the weakest parts of her books. This book is well worth that small disappointment, however, She is a gem among modern authors.

Kingsolver needs to find someone who narrates as well as she writes. Her speaking voice is monotonic and depressingly unable to express the individuality of different characters, men and women alike. The result: I gave up after several hours. Once past a confusing opening section, the story provided enough occasional pleasure to keep me going until (as noted) the negative qualities of her reading wore away my resolve to stick it out to the end.

Let me begin this review by saying I love almost everything Barbara Kingsolver has written. She has a solid place on my bookshelf with both her works of fiction and her wonderful book "Animal Vegetable, Miracle." This story attempts to combine both a fictional setting and characters to educate the reader on the very real threat of global warming. While I agree with the message, I couldn't have disliked the story or characters more. I found them on the whole whiny, and the repetitive dialog mind numbingly boring. Skip this book altogether. Read "Animal Vegetable, Miracle instead.