You know how you’ll be reading a novel and some passage will pull you up short, with a deep insight about some everyday thing—a new way of looking at something that feels so true and well-put and revelatory, a striking metaphor or turn of phrase. Such gratitude you feel as a reader every time you come upon such passages, a special turn of light, a flash of bird wheeling past, an unexpected harmony, rippling the flow of the story, causing you to momentarily pause and reflect with a smile and an exclamation of delight—an intense poetic glimmer in the surrounding prose.

What, then, when such moments grab you at the rate of two or three every page, as I’m finding in Barbara Kingsolver’s Flight Behavior? It’s almost exhausting, the sense of being completely awash in rhetorical brilliance, in waves of metaphorical stimulation. So many passages to savor and remember. Here’s an example. At the beginning of chapter 5, a stranger has stopped his orange Beetle in front of Dellarobia Turnbow’s Tennessee farmhouse, just after she puts her kindergartner son on the bus. He is “unbelievably tall … unfolding himself like a contractor’s ruler” as he gets out of his car. “She was accustomed to men of measure, but this one had a few inches even on the Turnbow men, and it went on from there.” He is dark-skinned, speaks with a reggae accent. She is wearing a coat over her pajamas. They introduce one another. He is “Ovid Byron, a crazy name as well. You might be the first to upstage that.” She is able to comment on the poetic origins of his name, thanks to her high school Honors English class. He “crinkles his brow” as he thinks further about her name: “’Also an artist,’ he declared. ‘I’m pretty sure of that, an Italian Renaissance painter. Della Robbia.’” She’s flabbergasted: “Shut the front door!” He says “You should look into it, woman. It’s your name.” Then the kicker: “The candor of this stranger took her breath away. Woman! And the idea of being named for an artist. A person could be reborn on the strength of that.”

It’s powerful and funny. It hits the reader with the same kind of astonishment as it hits Dellarobia herself. A good part of the power of this scene is its timing, coming immediately after a chapter that ended with such a deep sense of grief for humanity that it brought tears to my eyes: “Dellarobia had ridden out prayer meetings aplenty, but had no idea what to say to a family that had lost their world, including the mountain under their feet and the butterflies of the air.”

Monarch butterflies underlie the book. Dellarobia’s mother-in-law, Hester, says her “old mommy” called them “King Billies.” We gradually learn that Hester “… was a fount of strange woodland names like boneset and virgin’s bower, for which no person of their acquaintance seemed to have any use. That must be lonely, Dellarobia thought, to have answers whose questions had all died of natural causes.”

With great sympathy for all her characters, Kingsolver considers the clash between different ways of looking at the world—the invaluable passed-down-from-generation-to-generation practical understanding of regional plants and animals represented by Hester, an oral history threatened with extinction; and the larger scientific view of how all systems in the world are related to one another. Some on both sides of this divide gradually realize how much they have to learn from one another. At least that’s true for those willing to talk. As Dellarobia says at another point, “If people played their channels right, they could be spared from disagreement for the length of their natural lives. Finally, she got it. The need for so many channels.”

Kingsolver is an absolute master of dialogue and pacing, often in long, long set-pieces between two characters. One of the best comes late in the book, when Dellarobia and Hester are walking through February Tennessee woods, searching for any flowers that might have started to come up through the thin snow, the desperately needed energy source for the monarchs. The women get into an intense conversation about Dellarobia’s marriage to Hester’s son, sharing some honest feelings for the first time about Hester’s attitude regarding her daughter-in-law. They continue to walk, Hester leading the way. Suddenly, there they are, a small patch of tiny blossoms. Hester says “Mommy called them harbingers. Some of them says salt-and-pepper flowers.” And then this marvelous passage closes the scene: “Monarchs were already here, this source discovered. She saw two bright drifters coasting tentatively in the woods, and near Hester’s boots, the duller orange of folded wings at rest on a flower cluster. Nectaring, that was the verb. King Billy nectaring on the harbinger.” It makes me gasp even now, writing it down. Read this book.