Flight Behavior, published in 2012, explores a young woman's life as a housewife in fictional Feathertown, Tennessee. Dellarobia Turnbow quickly attracts both local and national attention after discovering a large colony of monarch butterflies in the fields behind her family's home. The discovery brings Ovid Byron, a distinguished ecologist, to the town, where he begins to study the butterflies and reveals how their behavior is related to climate change. Over the course of the novel, Dellarobia must confront her ongoing dissatisfaction with her marriage, her relationship to education, and her future aspirations—topics that are brought to the forefront by Ovid's arrival in Feathertown. Climate change and its effects loom over the novel as each character grapples with the inevitable reality of a shifting global climate.
The novel, much like Kingsolver's previous works, takes up social issues and tackles them through a fictional lens, exploring climate change, gender roles, education, and class. It also draws great influence from Kingsolver's own life growing up in rural Kentucky, incorporating imagery from the sociocultural landscape of rural Appalachia.
Flight Behavior was a public success, earning Book of the Year awards from the Washington Post and USA Today. While Kingsolver was already well-known for incorporating social justice and political activism into her novels, Flight Behavior solidified Kingsolver's status as a "climate fiction" writer.
