Animal Dreams was published by HarperCollins in 1990. Codi Noline returns to Grace, Arizona — a small, predominantly Hispanic mining town — to care for her father Homer, a doctor losing his memory to Alzheimer’s, and to teach biology at the local high school. Her sister Hallie has gone to Nicaragua to teach farming methods during the Contra War.
The novel alternates between Codi’s first-person narration and Homer’s increasingly fragmented third-person sections, creating a dual portrait of memory’s dissolution and reconstruction. Codi believes she has no connection to Grace — that she was always an outsider — but gradually discovers through the community’s memory what her own father’s disease has erased: that she belongs here, that she had a miscarriage as a teenager that everyone knew about, that the town’s identity is as much hers as anyone’s.
The political subplot involves the Black Mountain Mining Company dumping sulfuric acid into the river that irrigates Grace’s famous orchards. The women of the town, organized into the Stitch and Bitch Club, mount a campaign to stop the contamination — a plotline Kingsolver based on real communities fighting mining pollution in the American Southwest.
Collecting Animal Dreams
First edition (HarperCollins, New York, 1990): Boards with dust jacket.
Market values:
- First edition, fine in jacket: $40–$100
- Signed first: $80–$200