Climate change, no, it’s not a dirty word; it’s a very real and obvious plight. It’s that ‘thing’ that makes our winters wetter and milder, forcing trees to rot and fruit to blacken; it’s that thing that causes freak snow flurries in April and thirty degree heat -waves in October. We only have to look at our fruit to know that something is not quite right. Did you notice this summer how blackberries didn’t make an appearance until almost August and were short-lived? Or how fruit doesn’t seem to ripen in the bowl anymore, instead it turns from hard to harder or to an unpalatable mush in the blink of an eye. The question is, are you a contributor to this decay or are you doing your part in slowing the process down? Kingsolver, one of our most socially conscious authors, in the true Kingsolver way uses didactic methods to broach this prickly subject by using all the scientific power she is capable of yielding. It helps that she has a background in science of course.

As the reader delves deeper into the life of this butterfly which has changed its entire internal map by choosing to rest in an unstable environment by fleeing Mexico, the reader is also thrust further into the life of Dellarobia and the farming community that surrounds her. A charismatic scientist who goes by the name of Byron opens Dellarobia’s eyes and world in more ways than one, to which she in turn attempts to do also within her community. The farmers of Feathertown find themselves suffering in the hands of unseasonably wet weather to which they’ve put down to ‘god’s way’. The very people who endure the pains of environmental change are the ones who refuse to believe in it. Dellarobia’s youngest child’s vision is not all too different from many of the adult’s in this fable, as she writes on p112 “unseen things did not exist” which makes the reader question their own relationship to the environment.