Animal Dreams
Kingsolver, Barbara
This book has been described as “eco-feminist literature.” The main character, Codi Noline, returns home to Arizona after failures in medical school and relationships to care for her dying father. She renews a romance with Loyd, an Apache boy she dated four times in high school and by whom she became pregnant, miscarrying the baby in the bathroom and burying it down by the river without telling anyone. There are side plots about her sister Hallie helping farmers in Nicaragua and the local “Stitch and Bitch” ladies’ group working on an environmental issue. The title “Animal Dreams” refers to a Native American idea that animals dream about what they do in their waking life (such as dogs chasing rabbits) and that this idea translates to human dreams and how they live their lives. We also learn excruciating details about cockfights.
Meantime, Codi and Loyd have lots and lots of sex. Codi finds out what happened to her mother who died when Codi was 3 (her mother and father were 2nd cousins), who her family is, and that she’s good at something (teaching high school biology). The book ends with Codi being pregnant again with Loyd’s child.
It’s difficult to understand why Blue Valley teachers would choose this book. Click here to see a list of alternative novels your child could be reading.
Language includes fuck, fuckers, goddamn, shit, damn, ass, dipshit, dickhead.
EXCERPTS:
• I hated sleeping alone…All my life I’d shared a bed with
somebody: first Hallie…at college I discovered an army of lovers...Then
Carlo...
• I was 15 years old...At first it was nothing like a baby I held
inside me...I would be loved absolutely...Loyd took me out…four
Saturdays in a row, for exactly one lunar month...he was such a drinker
in those days…He never knew what he’d spawned, much less when it died.
• [J.T., her best friend’s husband]:...turned up the glass jar and
drank...tensing the muscles in his jaw when he swallowed. J.T.’s whole
body shone with sweat. I briefly imagined him naked...I’d slept with
someone’s husband before...
• Kissing Loyd was delicious, like some drug I wanted more of...when I slept, I had dreams of coyotes in heat.
• Carlo and I had gone to bed together for the first time one early
dawn during our rotation in pediatric intensive care...we’d gone
straight from the dead baby to my...bed...we just held on to each
other, joined, for a long as our bodies could stand it.
• Carlo came down with a cold...we were both burning up, our skin
hot to the touch, like furnaces. Our bodies’ internal combustion gave
rise to an unquenchable craving for...each other...made a kind of
sweaty, delirious love previously unknown to either of us...[the
elderly matron of the hotel brought them hot tea]: ...I lay beside him,
meanwhile, with the sheets pulled around my neck, feeling sinful and
out of place, like a whore taken home to meet Mother.
• ...what did I want from an Apache cockfighter...? His body,
yes…Tomorrow, I thought, or the next day, or the day after that, I
would have sex with Loyd Peregrina.
• He lifted the hand and ran his palm up the length of my arm…my
nipples stood up and my scalp tingled and my whole body wanted that
hand on it, everywhere at once...He twisted his fingers gently through
the hair at the base of my skull and held on tight, and my breath
stopped while he laid down a track of small kisses from my earlobe to
my collarbone…I rolled against him...Something inside his buttoned
shirt pocket made a crackling, cellophane sound. I raised up a little
and poked it with my finger. ‘If you’ve got a condom in your pocket,
Loyd Peregrina, this is my lucky day.’ He did. It was...we
disconnected...feeling the forbidden touch of sun on my nipples...with
a finger he traced concentric circles around my breast and triangles on
my abdomen...
• We went out those couple of times, and then so long sucker,
that’s it. Loyd’s a good-time boy, he don’t call the same girl
twice...Plain Jane forgives Mr. High School Honcho for being a
red-blooded boy.
• [Flashback to 15-year-old Codi crying in the bathroom...her
father] hears scrubbing. She is cleaning the floor. The toilet has
flushed more than two dozen times...[he follows her and watches as she
buries the baby, then comes back to the kitchen and tries to do
homework]: She tells him she has a headache...he gives her Demerol (He
is a doctor and knows that she needs more than aspirin. They don’t
speak about what has just happened).
• Oh, Jesus Christ...whoever’s spreading that gossip they’re full of shit.
• We were in my bed very late on a Sunday morning. Loyd was a wonderful insomnia cure, good enough to bottle.
• Plenty of time for a fuck.
• ...they thrust their birds toward each other three times in a rhythm that was frankly sexual.
• ...the birds have a little steel spur on the back of each leg. In
the knife fights they get blades...one bird had his spurs irretrievable
embedded in the breast meat of his opponent. It takes a very long time
for one bird or the other to die..internal wounds, hemorrhage,
punctured lungs, literally bleeding hearts. Eventually they began to
bleed from the mouths…it lay down in the dirt and wouldn’t get up. [The
handler] had to place it on its feet and push it back in the direction
of combat. Why don’t they just declare the winner? I whispered. There’s
rules [Loyd said]...I understood that in this unapologetically brutal
sport there was a vast tenderness between the handler and his bird…he
caressed the bird’s wings back into place, stroked its back, and licked
the blood from its eyes. At the end, he blew his own breath into its
mouth to inflate a punctured lung. He did this when the bird was nigh
unto death and clearly unable to win. The physical relationship between
Loyd and his rooster transcended winning or losing...I shivered as he
tossed the feathered corpse, limp as cloth, into the back of the truck.
The thought of Loyd’s hands on me made the skin of my forearms recoil
from my own touch.
• People who know a lot about anatomy make great lovers.
• She kept pointing out [cave] formations that reminded her of a
penis. You’ve only been away from home 3 days, I whispered. I didn’t
say it looked like J.T.’s, she whispered back.
• He was fifteen...we drank some, but I don’t think he was drinking the night he died. There was a fight in a bar.
• I undressed...He lifted me slightly out of the water and kissed
my ribs, one at a time…kissed my navel and the damp hill over my pubic
bone.
• Where do you go when you’ve pissed in every corner of your playground?
• [Codi takes her high school students on a field trip]: ...a rumor
that Connie Munoz gave Hector Jones a hand job in the back seat of the
bus on the way home. What did I expect? They were teenagers.
• [Codi’s student tells her]: I think it’s cool that you cuss and stuff when you’re mad...Hector Jones is a dickhead.
• Because they’re a greedy bunch of goat fuckers and they got what
they wanted…and now they have to squeeze it by the balls before they
let go.
• I badly wanted to take him inside to bed...If I told you I wanted
to go to bed with you right now, would you think I only loved you for
your mind?