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Lusa arrives in this world of long-established families and rigid traditions as the new wife of a young farmer, with her foreign Polish-Jewish-Palestinian background and her fancy scientific knowledge about bugs. Everything else in modern farming is a gamble, and farming is a hand to mouth business. We’ll start with Lusa: she lives on a farm where tobacco is the only crop that will grow reliably and store without rotting while waiting for the market’s best prices. It’s about the lives of four people living all quite near each other, in a small Virginia mountain valley and on the mountain itself. On a more recent rereading, I couldn’t even stop to make lunch until I reached the end. This novel is so intensely involving that, the first time I read it, I was up until 3am, sitting in the courtyard of a Spanish holiday cottage, desperately trying to finish the novel before I got eaten alive by night insects. This time on the Really Like This Book’s podcast scripts catch-up, I’m in very rural modern America, enjoying Barbara Kingsolver’s Prodigal Summer, where women are coyotes caring for their young, and a widowed scientist finds a new way to keep the family farm running.
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