Animal Dreams: A Novel

Beautiful imagery and poignant prose, this intensely moving story deals with love and loss and how we find ourselves again in the people who love us. Highly recommended. Interesting historical and political issues serve as background - Native American and Mexican cultural heritage and Nicaraguan political issues.

As with all Kingsolver novels, the reader feels as if they’ve entered the writer’s world and left with profound enrichment, without being sure why.

Codi returns to her hometown and has all the usual emotions and realizations. And she meets a hot Native American man who guides her spirit and has hot sex with her. And I believe she solves some sort of environmental mystery. Wish-fullfillment drek cloaked in "magical realism". Why was this assigned in high school?

Amazing! I loved the story and the characters. Thank you!

This is my favorite book. I’ve read it a dozen times. Each time I am transported.

I love her writing. It was a great story
Even though were sad parts it was a very hopeful book with a satisfying ending.

Gentle, deep, moving, a beautiful story and journey, thank you for the rich and heart felt ride.

Listen to the audio version read by the author – – a beautiful and spectacular work.

Barbara Kingsolver understands what’s important in life and, an even greater mystery, understands how to express it in a novel.

Novel is almost like a poem, narration is very pleasant.

She always amazes me.
With unique and poetic lines snuck into nearly every sentence it was difficult to make it through the book without trying to write everything down and share it with the people I love.

Excellent novel! Kingsolver never fails to amaze with her mind-blowing imagery, or her soul-shaping characters. In this novel, a woman named Codie goes home, not wanting to go there, but having no choice. When she’s there, she learns so much about herself, the relationships she has with people around her, and as she digs into her painful past and looks back on some really painful experiences, uncovers secrets that have long been kept from her and her sister. Definitely enjoyed listening to this novel.

Always one of my favorite authors. Thanks for the journey.

I read this years ago and loved it. Having it read to me this time by Barbara was amazing and the beauty of her language was like the blanket that held the remembrances.

Good gracious - what a treasure! This book will stay with me for a very long time.

I read this on a spring break trip in Florida. I loved the relationship between the two sisters. It was my first introduction to Kingsolver who quickly became one of my favorite authors.

Protagonist Codi Noline returns to her small hometown in Arizona, after fifteen years, to help her aging father, the town’s doctor, who has been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease. Codi felt like an outsider growing up. She and her father are not close. She is hired to teach biology at the local high school and is staying with a friend. She is concerned about her younger sister, Hallie, who has relocated to Nicaragua to assist with agricultural education, at a time when the Contras are engaged in violent civil unrest.

The story is told in alternating perspectives between Codi, in first person, and her father, in third person. If you have read Kingsolver’s books before, you will find familiar territory – environmental activism, beautiful writing about nature, and a strong female protagonist with issues to overcome. In this case, the environment is being threatened by a large corporation harvesting natural resources to use in the manufacturing, while killing the microbiota in the area.

The stark beauty of the American southwestern desert is elegantly evoked, with its ancestral Puebloan dwellings and natural springs. It is a slowly developing novel that relies on many simultaneous threads, including a family secret, a love story, several environmental elements, a willingness to act on one’s beliefs, and a community coming together in a common cause. Kingsolver has crafted these components into a compelling, multi-layered story.

Even though the world in which this story lives is realized in intricate detail, and I have to praise Kingsolver for this, it is a very introspective book. I wanted more character interaction. A lot of the time I felt trapped in Cosima's head, while lots of interesting characters revolved around. The events roll along at a slow pace. It felt a lot like the events that take place in people's lives day to day. Not many are worthy of describing in detail. The threads dealing with Cosima's sister, father, and boyfriend, could still be addressed through more character interaction, because it's the interaction where things get interesting. I wanted more of that and less introspection.

In a letter to Codi, Hallie writes, "'What keeps you going isn't some fine destination but just the road you're on, and the fact that you know how to drive.'" This is not a love story as the back of the book may have you believe. Sure, people fall in and out of love within its pages, but this book is really about understanding oneself amid a lifetime of memories and secrets...the risks we take not only when we cheat ourselves, but when we find ourselves, too. I read this for the first time two years ago to the month, needing it for the same reasons even though I've changed a lot, and this time got even a little more from it (which is why we should all read our favorite books multiple times!). I'm not going into a deeply personal reflection here in a public forum, but I think this is a loving book for people who've got some reckoning to do, spanning the greater good of the social and physical world to the individual soul.

The synopsis here has nothing to do with the book. (Translated from Spanish)

Fantastic, in a simple way I felt pathetic in front of life when I read some excerpts from the story, it's one of the best things I've read. (Translated from Spanish)

Amazing book. Refugees and issues with destruction of countries has not changed in 30 years. She writes good books

I always enjoy Kingsolver's work, and this book was no exception. I love the town of Grace, and had a hard time understanding why Codi would want to leave it!

This is a wonderful book. It does what many stories try to do: it simply tells a person's life, a snippet of time in the grand scheme of things, and in the process touches on some larger truth. Something that helps a reader with a new perspective, a new thing to think about.

Many stories try to do this. Most fail to do it thoroughly.

But Animal Dreams does it. It is pierced through with sorrow and love and loss and growth, all wrapped up in one special town that most see as a place to move from. Many have left Grace; few return.

And yet Codi comes back, the prodigal daughter, suitcase heavy with fear, alienation, loneliness, and aimlessness. She is un-rooted, and tugged by memories she can and cannot remember. This is a story of finding oneself, of coming together inside your own skin. Of becoming.

Codi holds most of the pages, but some of the most devastating passages are from the few chapters told from her father's point of view. He is how she could be. How we all can be, if we feel but don't let it out, if we hide behind histories long past but still capable of wounding.

My favorite paragraph: "...people's dreams are made out of what they do all day. The same way a dog that runs after rabbits will dream of rabbits. It's what you do that makes your soul, not the other way around."

I'll be reading more Kingsolver.

Codi Nolina has returned to Grace, AZ to teach high school biology and keep an eye on her strong-willed father, Homer Nolina. Codi has spent her life drifting along, seeking a place to belong. She finished medical school, but not her internship. She has moved at the whim of her lover Carlo. And she has come to Grace expecting to leave in a year when her teaching contract has expired. Hallie, her sister, has just left for Nicaragua to work helping poor farmers with more efficient farming. Hallie is energized by life and lives it to the fullest. And Codi feels even more adrift due to the physical distance between herself and her sister. What Codi did not expect was to reconnect with her high school lover Loyd, a railroad man and half Apache/half Navaho.

Normally I am not a person who re-reads books. But this is the third time I have read this one and each time I feel it is new to me. I am drawn to Codi who feels she has no place to call home. I am drawn to Loyd and his close connection to the land. And I am drawn to the inhabitants of Grace, AZ. Probably I will read it again sometime. I feel the book is not finished with me.

Short stories from one of my favorite authors. I didn't like this as well as her novels.

An excellent immersion into place and character. It explores the struggle of Codi to find a home and meaning to her life against the struggles of her father dealing with Alzheimer's and their home town's fight with the mining company.

This complex novel powerfully and movingly explores themes of love and grief, the difficult ties among family members, the bonds that can exist among people of shared cultures, and the responsibilities that humans have toward the earth. Codi Noline, a woman in her early thirties, returns to her home town of Grace, Arizona to attend to her physician father who is experiencing the onset of Alzheimer’s disease. Grace is a small town in the desert populated by people with deep Hispanic roots and by native people. It is known for its orchards that are the livelihood of many and for a copper mine that is largely defunct but still in limited operation.

Before arriving in Grace Codi has seen off her sister, Hallie, who has departed for Nicaragua where she will work as an agronomist assisting the rural population in improving their farming practices. Nicaragua has recently been liberated from a right wing junta’s control, but is under episodic attacks by the Contras supported by the US government. Codi and Hallie are extremely close. They were raised in Grace by their widowed father who was emotionally distant and remote from them. Growing up both girls felt like outsiders in Grace because of their intellect and height. Their father was constantly pushing them to demonstrate their superiority over their peers. Homer is driven to this by his belief that his family was never accepted by the locals; a result he claims of having relocated to Grace from Illinois.

Unlike her driven younger sister, Codi is adrift. She believes she has nothing of value to offer and is despairing of finding physical, vocational or emotional roots anywhere. She trained to be a doctor, but quit the profession during her internship. She was living in Tucson, working as a clerk in a convenience store and living with a doctor boyfriend who she wasn’t particularly close to. Codi takes a temporary teaching job in the Grace High School and moves in with a girl from her school years and her family.

Codi reveals that she had been pregnant as a teenager after a shallow sexual liaison with Loyd (with the missing “l”), an Apache schoolmate. Loyd was not aware of the pregnancy. Codi carried the baby secretly and lost it by miscarriage, burying it along a river bank behind her home. Her father was aware of this but never spoke of it or offered either support or reprobation.

Codi becomes reacquainted with Loyd who has matured and found employment as a railway engineer. Codi grows more attracted to Loyd and they start a love affair. Loyd is closely connected with the native people on the nearby reservation and through him she learns of the deep respect that the native culture holds for the earth. While they are watching a ceremony on the reservation Loyd explains that the native people see themselves as “guests” on the earth who must behave respectfully toward their “host” and leave the land unharmed from their stay on it. In contrast, the Anglo sense of the earth is that humans are entitled to use it for their gain without regard to the consequences of their actions. This difference is seen in a catastrophe that is unfolding in Grace. The mining company is trying to extract the last bit of copper from the mine tailings by introducing chemicals that enter the river and subsequently are poisoning the orchards. Codi discovers this and brings it to the attention of the townspeople. The devastation will be made worse by the company’s plan to divert the run off by damming the river, an act that will deprive the town of any water. The women of the town, with the scientific background provided by Codi, undertake a grass-roots campaign to draw attention to the environmental depravation. They gain enough public attention to cause the company to cease its practices.

Codi has a difficult relationship with her father who is in and out of lucidity. He has been so reserved and remote that there is no close bond between Codi and he. His insistence on high standards of behavior for the sisters Codi feels is the cause of their feelings of isolation from their peers. An interesting passage metaphorically shows Homer’s attempts at manipulating the natural nature of his daughters. He is an amateur photographer whose technique is to take pictures of natural objects and by manipulating the images in the dark room turn them into visages they are not.

Homer had always intimated that the lack of acceptance of the family was because they were seen as outsiders from another state. Codi finds out that this is not true. While Homer had been in Illinois for medical training, Grace was his hometown. His family had ties there dating back hundreds of years. His perception of being shunned stemmed from his resentment that it was the low social standing of his family that drew the disdain of others. In reaction, he works to make himself and his daughters superior.

Codi sees herself as having no deep connections to anyone or any place. Her low self-esteem leads to despair that she will ever make productive contributions to anything. Her self-loathing is so ingrained that she doesn't see the value she is bringing to her students, to the town’s fight against the polluter or to Loyd. She is blind to how much she is respected and loved. She is deeply drawn to Loyd who is clear that he wants a permanent relationship, but she repeatedly tells him she will not stay in Grace beyond the school year.

Codi savors the letters she is receiving from Hallie in Nicaragua. Hallie’s letters are a source of advice aimed at Codi to realize her value and worth to others. Then she receives the shocking news that Hallie has been kidnapped by the Contras and later murdered. This is so devastating that Codi determines to move on at the invitation of her former boyfriend to join him in Colorado. In her flight she begins to realize that she has found a place where she’s loved and valued. Hallie’s life has brought to Codi finally to the understanding that it’s how you live your life that determines your place in the world. Hallie said, “The very least you can do in your life is to figure out what you hope for. And the most you can do is to live inside that hope.” Codi realizes that Hallie's life reinforces what Loyd told her when they were talking about what animals dream about – they dream about what they do every day. And it’s what you do every day that enriches your soul and creates value in your life.

It is amazing to see how such diverse themes are woven so seamlessly into this fine novel. Kingsolver uses this forlorn locale to show how rich the cultural bonds of people can be. She clearly is intimately familiar with this region of the country (as she is with Appalachia in other works) and the setting adds depth to the ideas she conveys. Her training and sensibility as a scientist and an environmentalist and ecologist marvelously informs this work as it does in Flight Behavior and Prodigal Summer.

I enjoy Kinsolver's descriptions of Arizona but the main character, Condi, just kept on getting the in the way of the scenery. I never grew to care about her past or her tough life or her inability to fit in. She spends the entire book wining and feeling sorry for herself when much of her trouble is of her own making!

This book has these amazing little tidbits of wisdom thrown into it. You could read it as fiction and ignore its lessons but you would be missing out, so don't. Read it as guidance. You'll get more out of it.