Animal Dreams
Barbara Kingsolver
"Animal Dreams by Barbara Kingsolver. It primarily focuses on one girl, I think she's about 30, and kind of her return to her childhood home, a little town called Grace -- more of a village in kind of the mountains of Arizona -- and she comes home rather reluctantly. She grew up there with just her dad as a single father, and he was not very emotionally available during her entire upbringing. He had to raise her and her twin -- no -- her younger sister pretty much by himself; and he had strict rules, and they just didn't really emotionally bond. So she returned rather reluctantly because he seemed to be either getting dementia or schizophrenia -- he was not doing well. So she came to sort of babysit for a while.
It's her journey of kind of reacquainting herself with her past, some of which she had suppressed, looking at herself kind of through the eyes of others. She's the kind of woman who -- or person, rather -- who's lived her life looking over the next horizon, never looking around or being comfortable with what she has but always willing to move and look for her happiness somewhere else. I kind of identified with that, because I feel like the last 15 years I've been doing a little bit of that. I've always been looking for something else. What am I missing? What else should I be doing? And it's only recently that I've kind of pulled back from that and I'm learning just be happy with what I'm doing and the grass is not always greener elsewhere. She had to go through the journey of learning that for herself.
I think this book is probably geared more towards women, and that's prime -- just 'cause it's written from a woman's perspective, and I think she writes it assuming some basic facts about women. She talks about her lovers, she talks about things like that that men won't necessarily grab onto, so I think it's definitely written for women. I was kind of excited just because I'd never read anything by Barbara Kingsolver and I'd always heard that other people I knew had really enjoyed her books. I would give this book 4.25 stars."
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