Book Summary and Reviews of Animal Dreams by Barbara Kingsolver

Animal Dreams by Barbara Kingsolver

Animal Dreams

by Barbara Kingsolver

  • Published:
  • Jan 1990, 342 pages
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About this book

Book Summary

From Barbara Kingsolver, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Demon Copperhead and recipient of the National Book Foundation's Medal for Distinguish Contribution to American Letters, a passionate and complex novel about love, forgiveness, and one woman's struggle to find her place in the world.

"Animals dream about the things they do in the daytime just like people do. If you want sweet dreams, you've got to live a sweet life." So says Loyd Peregrina, a handsome Apache trainman and latter-day philosopher. But when Codi Noline returns to her hometown, Loyd's advice is painfully out of her reach. Dreamless and at the end of her rope, Codi comes back to Grace, Arizona, to confront her past and face her ailing, distant father. What she finds is a town threatened by a silent environmental catastrophe, some startling clues to her own identity, and a man whose view of the world could change the course of her life.

Blending flashbacks, dreams, and Native American legends, Animal Dreams is a suspenseful love story and a moving exploration of life's largest commitments.

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Reviews

Media Reviews

"Barbara Kingsolver demonstrates a special gift for the vivid evocation of landscape and of her characters' state of mind." ―New York Times Book Review

"Kingsolver achieves a fully realized and profoundly moral vision, one that is rooted in the land and our relationship to it." ―San Francisco Chronicle

"Kingsolver is a writer of rare ambition and unequivocal talent ... Animal Dreams is a complex, passionate, bravely challenging book." ―Chicago Tribune

This information about Animal Dreams was first featured in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.

Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.

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Author Information

Barbara Kingsolver Author Biography

Photo: Annie Griffiths

Barbara Kingsolver was born in 1955, and grew up in rural Kentucky. She earned degrees in biology from DePauw University and the University of Arizona, and has worked as a freelance writer and author since 1985. At various times in her adult life she has lived in England, France, and the Canary Islands, and has worked in Europe, Africa, Asia, Mexico, and South America. She spent two decades in Tucson, Arizona, before moving to southwestern Virginia where she currently resides.

Her books, in order of publication, are: The Bean Trees (1988), Homeland (1989), Holding the Line: Women in the Great Arizona Mine Strike (1989), Animal Dreams (1990), Another America (1992), Pigs in Heaven (1993), High Tide in Tucson (1995), The Poisonwood Bible (1998), Prodigal Summer (2000), Small Wonder (2002)...

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Other books by Barbara Kingsolver at BookBrowse
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Read-Alikes

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