A tiny woman with flame-colored hair, she is racing up the mountainside to toss her life away — hustling up the High Road in sexy, ill-fitting secondhand boots, dogged by the urge for a cigarette, lured forward by the thrill of a tryst.

Smart but scandalously undereducated, poor, beautiful, and bored beyond endurance, she is crushing hard on the amber-eyed charmer she’s on her way to meet. As Barbara Kingsolver’s novel “Flight Behavior” begins, our heroine, one Dellarobia Turnbow, is 28 and fleeing an existence that has become untenable, desperately trading the familiar safety of her good-hearted, dull-witted husband and their two small children for she’s not sure what.