The second of the three storylines centers on Lusa Maluf Landowski, the 28-year-old daughter of a college researcher and an entomology student herself, who has moved to Zebulon County after marrying Cole Widener.

Deanna writes a letter to Nannie, telling her she’ll be coming down from the mountain in September, and asking if she and her unborn child can stay with Nannie. Deanna isn’t sure whether he’s referring to her or the coyotes. She doesn’t tell Eddie, and he leaves in August with only a note that he’s “ met his match” (432). By the end of the summer, Deanna still sees the coyotes as a valuable predator that will revive the Zebulon Forest ecosystem, while Eddie still considers hating coyotes to be his “religion” (323).Īs summer turns toward fall, Deanna notices that she’s unusually tired and emotional, and she finally realizes she’s pregnant. Deanna spies the entire coyote pack and convinces Eddie to read her thesis, but she can’t change his mind. As time goes on, Deanna shares more of her past with Eddie, and readers learn that her father’s longtime lover was Nannie Rawley, a key figure in another of the novel’s three storylines, and that Deanna considered Nannie a maternal figure.

Despite her misgivings, Deanna gives in to the animal passion between them, and they embark on a passionate affair.Įddie comes and goes throughout the summer as Deanna wars between a body that “want one thing wholly” and a mind that wants “the opposite” (363)-she can’t resist her physical attraction to Eddie, yet her mind rebels against both his disruption of her comfortable life on the mountain, where she’s cut off from human contact, and the fact that he considers coyotes his “enemy” (176). Eddie is also twenty years younger than Deanna, and “half a head shorter” (27). Eddie is the son of a sheep farmer from Wyoming, and has come to Zebulon with the express purpose of hunting coyotes-the same animals that threaten his family’s farm. As the novel begins in late spring, Deanna is tracking a coyote-an animal she has a particular passion for, and chose as the subject of her graduate school thesis-when she’s surprised by a hunter, Eddie Bondo. The first of Prodigal Summer’s three storylines centers on Deanna Wolfe, a ranger in the Zebulon National Forest who spent her childhood in Zebulon County before marrying and teaching in the city, then returning to Zebulon to live alone in a cabin on the mountainside.

Prodigal summer book