This week, Fable and the Verbivore are thrilled to share our April book club episode! However, for this one we decided to approach the conversation a little differently. This month we invited a reader, our friend Sara Laverty, to pick a favorite book for us all to read and to join us on the podcast to discuss it. Sara chose Barbara Kingsolver’s novel Animal Dreams.

Animal Dreams is a story that takes place in rural Arizona, focusing on a young woman named Codi who returns for the first time in years to her hometown of Grace, AZ to help take care of her estranged father, the town doctor, who is struggling with dementia. The story revolves on themes of rediscovering and exhuming the past, evaluating the personal fictions that we tell ourselves so much we believe them as fact, and the ways in which small acts of hope can change the world.

In this episode, we dig into the layers of meaning that the author plants and grows throughout the book, discuss how her POV choices help to reveal the character of a narrator who doesn’t see herself or her past clearly, and note that some messages are so intrinsically human that they resonate years after they’re originally written.

We hope you enjoy this episode! It felt like such a gift to be able to share in this conversation with a friend who fell in love with this story many years ago and who passed on that spark to us. And now we pass it on to you.

Keep reading, writing, and putting your voice out there!

Into the woods,

Fable & The Verbivore

Notes:

During our conversation, we discussed where Barbara Kingsolver lived, since she seems to know the feel of Arizona so well. The Verbivore mentions that she previously lived for over twenty years in Tucson, AZ. That information was taken from the biography section of her website: http://www.kingsolver.com/biography/

Books Mentioned:

• Animal Dreams: A Novel by Barbara Kingsolver

• The Bean Trees: A Novel by Barbara Kingsolver

• The Poisonwood Bible: A Novel by Barbara Kingsolver

Music from: https://filmmusic.io
’Friendly day’ by Kevin MacLeod (https://incompetech.com)
Licence: CC BY (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/)