单选题 Barbarra Kingsolver"s last novel, The Poisonwood Bible, was a forest fire of a book about the Belgian Congo"s struggle for independence; gripping, blazingly smart, ferociously angry, out for control at times and, by my count anyway, 129 pages too long. Because Oprah recently smiled on Poisonwood—sending it back up the best-seller list for a return engagement—many readers will come to Kingsolver"s latest novel, Prodigal Summer, fresh from Africa, with visions of dead children and red ants still marching through their heads. When they encounter the first pages of the new book, they"ll breathe easy. Compared with Poisonwood, it"s literally a walk in the woods. Prodigal Summer tells three interwoven tales, all love stories of a sort, all set on or around Zebulon Mountain in southern Appalachia and all attacking the arrogance with which mankind presides at the top of the food chain. A strident forest ranger named Deanna Wolfe falls for a hunky young hunter who she suspects is only using her to track and kill her beloved coyotes. Two elderly neighbors—an organic grower named Nannie Rawley and a grumpy old man named Garnett Walker— bicker about pesticides. And, in the most resonant strand here, a frazzled twenty-something widow named Lusa Maluf Landowski tries to make a go of her farm after her husband"s truck jackknifed. Lusa thinks it"s morally wrong to grow tobacco. "Half the world"s starving... We"re sitting on some of the richest dirt on this planet, and I"m going to grow drugs instead of food?" Lusa"s in-laws distrust her—they think she"s an uppity city girl, and they resent the fact that she now owns their family"s homestead. When she asks them if anything but tobacco will clear a profit, they scoff at her; "Mary-jay-wanna. " Prodigal Summer doesn"t have the urgency of Poisonwood, or anywhere near as many flashes of inspired, ecstatic prose. There"s no way around that. Still, it"s a warm, intricately constructed book shot through with an extraordinary amount of insight and information about the wonders of the visible world—the secret lives of coyotes, the flight of moths and on and on. Kingsolver has a master"s degree in biology and ecology, and, according to her Web site, Kingsolver. com, she worked as an archeologist, X-ray technician, biological researcher and science writer before debuting with The Bean Trees in 1988. You can tell Prodigal Summer is clearly the product of lifelong fascinations and of a deeply held world view. Human beings are just one species among many here, mating, traveling alone or in packs and always fighting for territory. Kingsolver"s novel is rife with ecological debates, and the fierce-minded female characters always stand in for the author. Deanna, for instance, heatedly tells her lover that if he and his buddies keep killing coyotes there will actually be more coyotes because they reproduce faster when under siege.(Kingsolver ran across the argument in an Audubon magazine cover story that ran last year. It"s worth checking out the original piece to see how a novelist finds inspiration and then transmutes fact into fiction). Reading Kingsolver"s new novel, I eventually got sick of the fact that the women were almost always smart and right while the men were almost always stupid and wrong, but I recognize that many of her readers will regard this as—what"s the word?—realism. In any case, the ending of the novel is so suddenly and unexpectedly touching that it" d be churlish to gripe. The elderly neighbors stop fighting and start flirting. And Lusa finds a surprising comfort in her in-laws, who used to disapprove of everything about her: her ethnic name, her politics, her science, her cooking. If in-laws can get along, surely there"s hope for man and beast.

单选题 The first paragraph implies that unlike Prodigal Summer, The Poisonwood Bible______.

单选题 The article is to______.

单选题 Which of the following is true concerning Prodigal Summer?

单选题 From the last paragraph, we can see that the writer ______ when referring to the female characters in Kingsolver"s novel.