Barbara Kingsolver’s latest novel, “Flight Behavior,” is a tale of how people in rural Tennessee react to climate change. The protagonist, Dellarobia Turnbow, is a stay-at-home mother of two young children in a farming community in the hills. The story begins as she’s hiking up the farm’s back mountain for a rendezvous with a lineman from the phone company, but she abandons her adulterous plan after seeing ripples of orange fire on the mountainside — although she doesn’t have her glasses on, and what she supposes are flames are really millions of monarch butterflies.

Graphic from HarperCollins Publishers

The monarchs have never come to these parts, but a natural disaster has destroyed their winter habitat in Mexico, and the butterflies appear in November in the Volunteer State — the implication being it’s warm enough there to host them, even though it’s almost winter.

The butterflies disrupt life in the quiet town. Dellarobia’s in-debt father-in-law wants to sell the mountain land to a logging company, but others want to preserve it and charge money to tourists to see the monarch colony. Media outlets interview Dellarobia, who becomes a reluctant mini-celebrity for having her butterfly “vision” — but some feel it goes to her head.

Then a lepidopterist from a New Mexico university comes to study the butterflies. Soon, the Turnbow barn gets converted to a lab and Dellarobia works part-time for the scientist, along with his graduate students, in an effort to uncover what’s going on with the monarchs.

Kingsolver calls “Flight Behavior,” which was published in fall 2012, “a fictional story within a plausible biological framework.” It’s an enjoyable tale with a witty, worrying main character who elicits our sympathy. Kingsolver’s vivid prose and ease at weaving this tale make it a fun, compelling read, one that provides insight to the worlds of science and rural America.

Those interested in science will enjoy the detailed scenes in the field counting and observing butterflies, or in the lab conducting lipid extraction experiments and parasite counts. Some parts are like “CSI” or “Bones,” but with butterflies rather than dead bodies and poetic passages rather than worn clichés.

Back in the real world, the New York Times recently reported monarch numbers in their Mexican wintering grounds have declined for the last seven or eight years. The amount of territory they cover in winter shrunk 59 percent from 2011 to 2012, due to the impacts of drought and record-breaking heat. (The Yale Environmental 360 blog recently published an interview with University of Kansas insect ecologist Orley Taylor, too.) It seems “Flight Behavior” is a case of fiction underscoring truth.

Dan Kulpinski will graduate with an M.S. Environmental Sciences and Policy degree in May 2013.

(Creative Commons image “Monarch Butterfly [Norristown Farm Park],” courtesy of stinkenroboter via Flickr. Video from HarperCollins Publishers.)