P.G. Smith Author

When I think of the 80s now, I think of Ronald Reagan, the conservative backlash, the abortion wars, and the AIDS epidemic. But when I was living through the 80s, I must admit I didn’t think much about any of that. Mostly, I worried about doing a good job to advance my career, what my teenage children were doing, and later, my new-found love and marriage. Most of us are focused on living life. Barbara Kingsolver is unparalleled at telling stories about living life.

Animal Dreams is a story about what it was like to be a woman in the 80s. There are two sisters that we first view through the eyes of their father, looking at them as they sleep, curled together in one bed, even though they have two beds. ‘He spent a lifetime noticing small things from a distance.’ We feel his worry, his fear of how much they will have to lose in their life to come. A feeling so many parents have: his helplessness to protect them.

By the 1980s women were expected to work, to have careers and independent lives. Codi and Hallie Moline do just that–more or less. Codi, the older girl, follows her father into the medical profession, but drops out during her residency, when she realizes she is not cut out to be a doctor. Lost and uncertain, she works various jobs, while following her surgeon lover to Greece and Europe, winding up back in Tucson with her lover and her sister.

Hallie is much clearer about what she wants out of life; she wants to help people. An expert in horticulture, she decides to go to Guatemala to help the struggling farmers with their crops, even though the country is in a civil war. No one can dissuade her. She believes in the cause.

When Hallie leaves Tuscon, Codi does too. She goes back to her tiny hometown of Grace, Arizona, ostensibly to teach high school science for a year and to check on her distant, ailing father, but more importantly, to confront her past and try to figure out who she is. What she finds is a town facing an environmental catastrophe, a hidden past she never imagined, and a handsome Apache locomotive engineer who challenges her to live life instead of watching it pass by.

If you like books about history or about the 80s, you will love this one. If you like books about someone trying to find herself, you will love this one. It is an enchanting, suspenseful love story, but so much more. It’s also a story about a woman who finds herself in a town being slowly murdered by mine runoff that no one knows how to stop; a woman who doesn’t know if she will ever see her sister alive again; a woman who may not be able to reach the father she never really knew as a child.

Introducing a cast of colorful characters and exotic locations, while interweaving issues of environmental exploitation, indigenous cultures, and the war in Guatemala with one woman’s search for belonging, this is Kingsolver at her best. Even if you read it a long time ago, this is one of those books that merits re-reading. And if you haven’t read it, don’t let it slip by.