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Good stories start on the day that was different. Flight Behavior by Barbara Kingsolver starts on a day that is so different for Dellarobia Turnbow, she initially doesn’t know what’s happened to her, not in the immediate sense or in the larger sense that is about to engulf her life. Alone at the top of a mountain on her husband’s parents’ farm, she’s stunned by a vision of liquid light flowing down an opposite mountain and across the valley below. Every bough on every tree glows with an orange blaze. Then the flames appear to lift from individual treetops in showers of orange sparks.

As she watches the phenomenon, Dellarobia is certain she’s been sent a sign, like Moses and the burning bush, and she’s equally certain about the meaning of the sign. Seeking more in life than her routine as a farm wife and mother, she’s come to the mountain top for a rendezvous with “the telephone man,” as she thinks of him, an acquaintance who’s barely out of his teens. Although she knows she’s risking everything that’s solid in her life and the lives of her children, she’s forged her way up the mountain. Until she’s stopped by this miracle—not really fire, not really anything she’s ever seen before—a spectacle sent to combat her evil obsession.

Part frightened, part amazed, she turns around and goes home. Not until she returns to the mountain top with her husband and in-laws does she realize that the moving orange vision is a sea of Monarch butterflies, hundreds of thousands of butterflies, covering the trees and hanging in large clumps like hornets’ nests.

Soon word of the butterflies on the mountain spreads, bringing hordes of reporters and curious spectators, plus a few scientists, to the scene. One scientist, a professor named Ovid Byron from a university in New Mexico, gets permission to park his trailer on the property so he can study the butterflies. By being neighborly, Dellarobia learns from Ovid that the butterflies are harbingers of serious changes in the environment. Normally Monarch butterflies spend the winter in Mexico, but for some reason they’ve chosen to spend this winter in Tennessee. The culprit, Ovid explains, is climate change. The nesting roosts in Mexico have become too warm.

The realization horrifies her, but Ovid says he’s not there to save butterflies; he’s there to try to read what they are “writing on our wall,” a message of the dangers of global warming. “We’re seeing a bizarre alteration of a previously stable pattern,” Ovid says. “A continental ecosystem breaking down.”

That Kingsolver is able to beautifully juxtapose the far-reaching breakdown of an ecosystem (and a climate pattern) with the individually focused breakdown of Dellarobia’s life is a testament to the author’s brilliance, not only as a writer but as a scientist as well. She earned degrees in biology from DePauw University and the University of Arizona. Her knowledge of the climate crisis threatening the world today is evident throughout the novel.

But also is her knowledge of the shattering crises that can seem to come from out of nowhere to shake a person’s being. During the months that Dellarobia works with Ovid, her feelings for him, for herself, for her life, and for the work that they are doing together swell, shrink, and shift, sloshing about inside her like the torrents of rain that have plagued her part of Tennessee all fall. As their work draws to an end, she’s aware of “the impossible idea of returning to her previous self. The person who’d lit out one day to shed an existence that felt about the size of one of those plastic eggs that pantyhose came in. From that day on, week by week, the size of her life had doubled out. The question was how to refold all that back into one package, size zero.”

As I said in my blog post about “Rose-Johnny” in June, Kingsolver is one of my favorite authors. I have long admired her skill in story-telling and her gift for original metaphor, which is so evident in the quotation above. I also admire her ability to see both the large picture and the small. In The Poisonwood Bible, the novel I consider to be her masterpiece, Kingsolver examines the Congo’s fight for independence from Belgium in the mid-twentieth century at the same time she describes an evangelical preacher’s family members’ struggle for independence from him.

In the same way, juxtaposition of the immediate tragedy with the much larger picture is the power of Flight Behavior. The Poisonwood Bible may be Kingsolver’s masterpiece, but Flight Behavior isn’t far behind.