Animal Dreams

Locations
Call Number: Adult Book / Fiction / General / Kingsolver, Barbara
On Shelf At: Westgate Branch

Location & Checkout Length	Call Number	Checkout Length	Item Status
Westgate Adult Books 4-week checkout	Adult Book / Fiction / General / Kingsolver, Barbara	4-week checkout	On Shelf

Originally published in 1990 by HaperCollins.

REVIEWS & SUMMARIES

Summary / Annotation
Author Notes

COMMUNITY REVIEWS

Losing and gaining family submitted by jmenik on June 26, 2011, 4:11pm Here Kingsolver again addresses one of her perennial topics--what it is like to grow as an individual through the loss and gain of family members. Great storyline, with some sweet sassy characters!

Three cultures meet submitted by Jen Chapin-Smith on August 30, 2013, 9:25am "Animal Dreams" by Barbara Kingsolver begins as Codi Noline returns to her hometown of Grace, Arizona to help her father as he struggles with Alzheimer's disease. Although everyone expects her to take his place as the town's doctor, Codi instead becomes the new biology teacher at the local high school. In the process, Codi leans more about the local Native American population (as her boyfriend is a member of one of the local Nations) and Hispanic culture as she tries to help some of the Latina women fight the local mining company that is polluting the town's agricultural water supply.

Meanwhile, Codi's sister Hallie is teaching people in Nicaragua about sustainable farming techniques until the Contras kill her. Like many people in the United States, Codi did not previously know that her government was funding war that killed civilians, particularly indigenous peoples, in Central America until her sister writes to her about the violence and then dies because of it. The novel is therefore a good way for many Americans who are ignorant of their government's role in the 1980s Central American genocide to learn about it.

Because of the deaths, the novel is particularly heart-rending and while I highly recommend it, I urge readers to approach with caution.

Slow start, but interesting issues submitted by Susan4Pax -prev. sueij- on June 17, 2014, 8:36pm I loved _The Bean Trees_ so much that I was excited to find this book by Kingsolver, yet ended up having a fairly hard time with it. Mostly, it got off to a slow enough start before we really got caught up in the deep issues of the story that I couldn't decide if it was worth my time.

Wimpy characters who don't know themselves just don't pull me in very well.

But eventually there were enough threads between the sister, the father, the (new) boyfriend, and the narrator Codi actually engaging in her own world that I wanted to know what came next.

Hmmm. Maybe it's like this: I heard an NPR interview once in which an author said, "A story is when something happens, and therefore something changes." The problem is that Codi is drifting through her life, and so she is not the agent of her own changes. It made the story a hard sell for me.

I'm glad I read it. Kingsolver takes on really interesting issues. But I will probably screen her books a touch more carefully before I put them on my shelves after this one.

Animal Dreams submitted by kferguson on August 29, 2017, 8:13am Kingsolver tells a fine story with rich characters

Animal Dreams submitted by crp on August 5, 2019, 11:24pm This is one of my favorite books of all time. Minus one scene (which really made me think as a teenager when I first read it) I think it's wonderfully crafted.