A child would seem
to be the last thing twentysomething Taylor (aka Marietta) Greer needs as
she escapes rural Kentucky and drives west in a car so
ramshackle that she has to push start it with one leg out the door. Yet
when she passes through the Cherokee Indian reservation in Oklahoma
and a woman drops a baby on her passenger seat, Taylor drives away an
instant mother. She names the little girl Turtle for her stubborn grip.
The car has two flat tires when they get to Tucson, and there they
stay.
The Bean Trees
is a celebration of the community Taylor forms in her new life. She
becomes fast friends with her landlady, another Kentucky native and single mom, and with her boss, the woman whose tire shop she
pulled into on arriving in Tucson. The latter operates not only the shop but also a sanctuary for illegal
immigrants fleeing brutality in their native land. Two Guatamalan
refugees figure in Taylor's life as both friends and
assistants in her adoption of Turtle. And, of course, there is the parent-child relationship in which Taylor learns the
responsibility of caring for a formerly abused child, and Turtle learns to
trust and begins to speak. "Bean trees" are what she calls the seed
pods of wisteria trees.
Taylor, a fiesty, tough-talking, insightful young woman, is chief among
an number of delightful characters in this first novel from Barbara
Kingsolver, who is rightfully revered now. Taylor and Turtle, then 6,
are also featured in Kingsolver's Pigs
in Heaven (1993).
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