She squints, being too vain to wear glasses to her first tryst. She's left the kids at her mother-in-law's, and while her sweet, boring husband is at work, she slips on her not-for-walking dress boots and painfully picks her way up the hillside. But she never reaches the cabin where the guy she can't get out of her head awaits, because she sees something in a stand of trees on the hill -- what exactly, without her glasses, she can't say, but it's so unworldy and unsettling that it turns her life around. So begins Kingsolver's deeply moving and often hilarious novel whose characters will stay with you long after the last delicious page. — Bob