Animal Dreams audiobook

I was a bit disturbed that I could appreciate this book. While I have liked a lot of Kingsolver's other work, this particular book is centered around the sort of seriously damaged character that usually turns me off to a book. And had I read this in high school, or college, or maybe even grad school, I'm fairly certain I would have disliked it tremendously.And yet... having read it when I did, I was able to identify with some elements of the what the character was experiencing, even if I didn't approve of her methods with dealing with those issues. And that made the book meaningful to me. Maybe that's a sign that I'm becoming mature. Let's hope not... Anyway, the book dances around a lot of issues - touching on corporate malfeasance in environmental impact, the atrocities funded by the U.S. government that the U.S. public does its best to ignore, teenage pregnancy, Alzheimer's disease, the nature of love and friendship, barriers to happiness, and finding meaning in life. Quite a lot of large things for such a small book. And because of that, the book doesn't focus on any one topic enough to really deal with it successfully. It whets your appetite and then goes skimming elsewhere. I would probably have found that annoying, but for the fact that Kingsolver's writing is so fluid that the trip itself is enjoyable, even if you don't end up anywhere. Which mirrors the central message of the book, to the extent that there is one. Overall, I'm glad I read the book. And while its not the sort of book I'm likely to recommend to anybody, its also not the sort of book I'm likely to steer people away from either.

This is only the second book that I've read by Barbara Kingsolver, and I'm very interested in learning about her writing process. She has this infectious, cultural curiosity that drives her to learn anything and everything about a place and its people...even if they only exist in her mind. She creates an entire world of history, geography, lineage and folklore. And every character is filled with so much wisdom and humor that I feel like I was given a sneak peak into Kingsolver's personality. Even when her characters are making their mistakes, they are learning and changing. It's as if Kingsolver is teaching a lesson she learned at the same moment she wrote it.She also has this way of juxtaposing the fiction with real life events. In Animal Dreams, Hallie, a daughter of a tiny canyon village in Arizona keeps her sister, Codi, connected to the war in Nicaragua. Hallie spreads truth and hope with her letters...two subjects that aren't too prominent in Codi's life.

It's been nearly thirty years since I've read this, and it's amazing which details linger.Their old shoes were in the attic, arranged neatly by size in a row. As if they'd ever need them again.

This is my favorite Kingsolver novel, and I've re-read it several times, not because it's the best "literature" but because I loved several the characters and some of the imagery... I even named my cat after the main character's sister. Sort of. Anyway, it's readable in a day or two; it's a little preachy and the plot is contrived, but of great sentimental value to me. And the scene of Cody's aging father developing black and white photographs meant to resemble completely unrelated objects really affected me.

I found this at Brattleboro Books, the used bookstore in town, and thought that if I actually bought it, maybe I would finally read it. I've checked it out of three different libraries now at least five times, but somehow have always been too distracted to get into it. I have paid enough library fines because of this to have paid for my used copy several times, I'm sure. But ohhh my. This was perfect. My (early-)mid-winter desert escape.How do these things find us just when we need them? I think Barbara Kingsolver has taught me more about love and hope than anything else has (I'm not sure what that says about my relationships..); she was just what I needed right now.[sidenote!: as I was finishing this book, my cat Simon was curled up asleep next to me and was clearly having some incredible dreams -- he started chattering and twitching his ears and whiskers like crazy! So if he was dreaming about what he does when he's awake (as this book would have it), he was dreaming of... eating. And uh.. sleeping?][also!: I'd forgotten about this. Tucked away between two pages of this book were two little paper cut-out people folded together in a passionate 2D embrace. One more reason to buy used books!]

Barbara Kingsolver has a gift that allows the reader to identify with the land that she is writing about. This story is as much about the main character, Cosima Noline, as it is about her hometown Gracela Canyon, where she grew up and moves back to as a thirty-something. As with Kingsolver's Poisonwood Bible, this story has the characters reflect on their place in the world as individuals as well as in their family, community and workplace. The writing is moving and beautiful. And although I read this is just a couple of days, the story will most likely stay with me for a while.

Animal Dreams is a story of loss and blindedness, community and homelessness, family and rejection, passion and hopelessness, set against and in the war in Nicaragua and a man-made disaster set to devastate the small town of Grace, Arizona. Kingsolver is nothing if not ambitious with her themes.Despite the variety of themes – add on falling in love, self-discovery, belonging, etc. – I never felt lost. Instead, I wanted to move to Grace, where a motherless child could discover that she had 50 mothers, where you could be lost, but taken in by your best friend from high school, where your high school boyfriend might fall in love with you (15 years later). I wanted these often-damaged people as my friends. (Aren't we all damaged to some degree?)Animal Dreams is a story of firmly-held self-perceptions and worldviews, which can be firmly held and slowly shattered: “We were a bad family. Try to understand. We learned it in school along with the multiplication tables and the fact that beasts have no souls. I could accept the verdict, or I could prove it wrong” (p. 287). Rather than falling apart, we can become whole.Most of Animal Dreams is told from Codi's perspective, although her dementing father briefly describes his experience, expertly confusing past and present, and her sister Hallie sends missives from Nicaragua, where she has gone as an agricultural consultant. Codi and Hallie were so attached, like keenly mismatched Siamese twins conjoined at the back of the mind, so their stories offer fresh and linked perspectives like pieces from a single puzzle (p. 8). Codi's mother died when Hallie was born. Her father, town doctor and quintessential outsider, could not parent his daughters in the way that Hallie, at least, wanted. She wondered,The strangest thing is that where pain seemed to have anesthetized me, it gave Hallie extra nerve endings. This haunts me. What we suffered in our lives we went through together, but somehow we came out different doors, on different ground levels. (p. 89)Worldviews are not inevitable consequences of our experience, but they feel inevitable: I’d lost what there was to lose: first my mother and then my baby. Nothing you love will stay (p. 233). Siamese twins experience the same world, but "mismatched Siamese twins" like Codi and Hallie, certainly did not. Are their unique experiences the causes of their differing perspectives – or vice versa?Animal Dreams is also a story of healing, of allowing oneself to love despite your instincts, despite fearing being hurt. Codi "danced" with the population of Grace, passed from one to another, while fervently declaring she could not dance. But our dreams matter, believing that things can be different matters.“Your dreams, what you hope for and all that, it’s not separate from your life. It grows right up out of it.... If you want sweet dreams, you’ve got to live a sweet life.” (p. 134)

American exceptionalism was not fueled by some unique spiritual vigor. It was a frighteningly efficient juggernaut powered by the ability to destroy, forget, and move on. That is what Hallie realizes and tells her sister Codi: “She said we were a nation in love with forgetting the facts.” (p.61) That truth strikes Codi, her older sister by a mere three years, as Loyd shows her the land – his land, the land of the Apache, Navajo and Pueblo. She muses: “To people who think of themselves as God's houseguests, American enterprise must seem arrogant beyond belief. Or stupid. A nation of amnesiacs, proceeding as if there were no other day but today. Assuming the land could also forget what had been done to it.” (p.240)Kingsolver embeds this idea in a thoughtful and at times intense exploration of personal loss. Her setting is a remote Arizona settlement named Grace. It is an American anomaly, drawing its identity from its continuity. The fruit orchards are ancient. The wild peacocks are descendants of the pets that nine girls, scarcely emerged from childhood, brought with them from Spain. They had been betrothed to gold miners. The descendants of these nine blue-eyed Gracela sisters have the same startling eyes, and intermingled family bloodlines. On November 2, the Day of All Souls, these descendants unite to commemorate their long dead family members and decorate their graves.But Grace is dying. The evidence is in the orchards. Fruit falls prematurely from the trees. The evidence is in the water. Leaching chemicals have acidified the river killing off its microscopic biomes. Now, exploiting an environmental loophole, the Black Mountain Mining Company plans to divert the river. Without the river, the land is finished. Seasonal rains will no longer slake its thirst. “The river was Grace's memory of water.” (p.269)Grace is the birthplace off Codi and Hallie Nolina. Codi has returned, ostensibly to help their father Doc Homer who is suffering from Alzheimers. Her arrival is a reminder of her own losses. Memory and the emotions that accompany loss are the heart of this novel. Codi has spent the past 15 years forgetting. Their mother died when she was three. Their emotionally repressed father tried to mold his young daughters with the control he exerted over the photographic images he developed as a hobby. Codi is unsettled to hear stories of her childhood from people she grew up with, stories half-erased that hover in amorphous limbo in her dreams. “Those things didn't seem so much the actual memories as like things I might remember from a book I'd read more than once.” (p.11) Even her sister Hallie is surprised by what she has forgotten. The one memory she never shared with Hallie, the one she cannot forget, is of the miscarriage she suffered when she was fifteen. Kingsolver intersperses Codi's story with Doc Homer's own memories now detached from time. His present is rapidly unraveling into a hallucinatory past. His memories are more accurate than Codi's, and are saturated with the emotions he withheld at the time. That silence along with his need to feel in control explains much of the estrangement that grew between him and his daughters. Hallie is Codi's anchor. She has found the connection she wanted in Nicaragua, applying her knowledge of agronomy to help the villagers feed themselves. However, the narrative follows Codi's much more uncertain path. She thinks of herself as an alien in the village, someone who never fit in. Yet, as a temporary middle school biology teacher she finds connection with the rambunctious adolescents. Later, she is drawn into a feisty sewing circle of old women who call themselves the Stitch and Bitch Club. Their primary fundraiser is creating pinatas using the peacock feathers they have collected throughout the year. Codi's passion energizes these women into a community bent on saving the town. With hesitation, she even forms a connection with Loyd, who displays a surprisingly profound view of life based on many of the losses he, too, experienced.The pace of this novel is slow, but it gathers momentum like a river receiving the bounty of its tributaries.NOTES:Review and interview that place the novel in the context of its time: https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytim...