Pigs in Heaven

One, it's beautiful. This woman can write. From elegant descriptions to well-formed characters, nothing disappoints the mature reader. Two, it deserves a willing suspension of disbelief. So the plot is a bit unlikely; it doesn't matter. And I've lived long enough to know that it's only slightly unlikely that some of the strangers in this novel would prove to have connections. If a lyrical, meaningful, warm-hearted and provocative big story is what you crave, read this. Don't dismiss this as a woman's story, or a story about women who don't understand men. Although the male characters have smaller roles, they are very important, and very likeable. Kingsolver does a virtuoso trick of letting you see them through the eyes of flawed observers and yet rather more clearly. As for the negative reviews: You might also note that nearly all of those who didn't like this book commented on their own political divergence of opinion or were forced to read it for school. Who asked them about their politics? Who cares? As for the mewling high schoolers, too many of whom have a lot of trouble spelling, punctuating or matching cases, please realize that bathroom images are not an impressive metaphor for your opinion. Less emotion and more substance from both sets, please.

One, it's beautiful. This woman can write. From elegant descriptions to well-formed characters, nothing disappoints the mature reader. Two, it deserves a willing suspension of disbelief. So the plot is a bit unlikely; it doesn't matter. And I've lived long enough to know that it's only slightly unlikely that some of the strangers in this novel would prove to have connections. If a lyrical, meaningful, warm-hearted and provocative big story is what you crave, read this. Don't dismiss this as a woman's story, or a story about women who don't understand men. Although the male characters have smaller roles, they are very important, and very likeable. Kingsolver does a virtuoso trick of letting you see them through the eyes of flawed observers and yet rather more clearly. As for the negative reviews: You might also note that nearly all of those who didn't like this book commented on their own political divergence of opinion or were forced to read it for school. Who asked them about their politics? Who cares? As for the mewling high schoolers, too many of whom have a lot of trouble spelling, punctuating or matching cases, please realize that bathroom images are not an impressive metaphor for your opinion. Less emotion and more substance from both sets, please.

I agree with all the other reviewers! However, let me make one observation. All the other reviewers that rated the book highly appear to be women. This book is an "adventure"/journey/sojourn
of a woman and I found it very, ahhh, "Oprahesque".......people who like Oprah's picks will like this book. I read the predecessor to this book, know the characters from that book, and enjoyed this story less. Don't give up here on my review because Kingsolver had some choice nuggets in this book that I will discuss farther down. I found the book very slow going, not a page turner at all. The characters are quirky if not downright eccentric. The plot is really really out there. Mom and daughter watch man fall into Hoover Dam??? Then go on Oprah?? Whoda thunk? Then an Indian lawyer spots them on TV and decides to go after Mom? Sheeesh!
What I do like is the author's insights into human nature and keen observations on the human condition. She puts these into tiny "nuggets" of expression and sprinkles them lightly throughout. I just wish they were sprinkled a little more generously I guess.
Here's an example: I thought the Author's description of Jax, Taylor's boyfriend, and their relationship was great. Jax really is crazy about Taylor but Taylor is lukewarm at best about her feelings for Jax. Unfortunately, this is a minor thread in the story. Jax says: " Sex will get you through times with no money better than money will get you through times with no sex".
Also, Taylor's mom, after joining the Cherokee Nation and attending her first Indian Stomp Dance reflects on feeling completely included in something for the first time in a long time in her life. Those insights into the human condition are what I love in Kingsolver's writing. I guess I want more of those nuggets of her observation. The nuggets were few and far between.

This book (along with The Bean Trees) came to me through the mail from a friend in Canada, otherwise I'd probably never have read it. As it happened, I'd recently finished a course in American History so I was ready for a perspective on the Native American situation. I hadn't appreciated its complexity and whilst I'd consider myself a liberal, I'd also come to care deeply for Taylor and Turtle, I'm a mother myself, and I was ready to kill anyone who tried to part them. Gradually this wonderful writer chipped away at my prejudices and got me inside the skin of a completely unfamiliar community.
What do I love about this book? It's unputdownable. It's full of memorable, beautifully realised characters. It doesn't write anybody off as too boring, too old, too screwed-up or too anything to have feelings and be fascinating. I've rarely come across a relationship more beautifully portrayed than the growing and richly deserved love between Cash and Alice. The ending made me want to run around the garden whooping. If it has any faults it's (a) an over-reliance on the long arm of coincidence but heck, Dickens did that as well and nobody blamed him for it and (b) a tendency to make the Indian characters maybe a little too likeable in the interests of political correctness. But both these pale into insignificance beside the beauties of this wonderful book.
I had no problem understanding why Taylor hung on so long before surrendering the child she thought of as hers - she'd become a mother, and she was damn stubborn. I like the way this book contrasted the individualism of the American Dream with the human need for more social connection without falling into trite and oversimplistic solutions. The wonderful chat between Jax and Anawaukee got this across very powerfully. And I understood why it only took a seemingly trivial thing to make Taylor finally give up her fight - but then I have a lactose-intolerant (and completely Anglo-Saxon!) child.
"The Poisonwood Bible" has just appeared over here and I hope we're going to hear a lot more of Kingsolver. We Brits might think the Indian issue isn't our business but we're postcolonials struggling to find our identity too. These themes are universal.

[Spoilers]
This is one example of a story about a situation that would have turned out just as well, if not better, if the central character had never intervened at all. Annawake, the Cherokee attorney, is wildly unethical and on a personal crusade throughout the story, and Kingsolver's efforts to make readers sympathize with Annawake's personal agenda don't work. Kingsolver wants to set up a tension between the interests of Annawake (and by extension, the Cherokee tribe), and Turtle's family.

So let's look closer. First of all, Annawake pursues an Indian Child Welfare Act (ICWA) case against Turtle's adoptive family. She does this based entirely on personal feelings, not because any case has come before her, or because the tribe asks her to use the tribe's resources to pursue this issue (she can't even prove that Turtle is Cherokee--she merely sees the girl on TV and simply makes a guess that Turtle is conveniently within her jurisdiction. She happens to be right, but only by luck). In fact, her employers don't even agree with her actions and are reluctant to support her. No biological family member emerges to make any claim on the girl's adoption until more than halfway into the book; to that point, this is Annawake's solo adventure. Let's just stop and acknowledge that any attorney who opened a case without cause, and who admits in writing to the defendant that her motivation stems from personal psychological transference to the case rooted in her own unresolved childhood, would be subject to serious ethical complaints, if not disbarment.

It gets worse. Annawake and Turtle's grandmother, Alice, implausibly meet to chat over coffee. (Any grandmother whose grandchild were being threatened by a lawyer on a personal crusade would hardly meet at a diner with the adversary) Alice discloses that the family does indeed have Cherokee blood, and is qualified for enrollment. She asks Annawake if that would be sufficient to close the case. The REAL legal answer is "Yes," and Annawake should have backed off immediately and referred the family to the tribal membership office, period. Any other intrusion at that point is absolutely illegal. But Annawake's answer is that it's not that simple, because blood and enrollment do not constitute a tribal culture. But that's not her call! She is WAY out of her jurisdiction here. The moment she learns that the adoptive family actually IS Cherokee-blooded, the ICWA case closes; there is NO clause in the ICWA that imposes a "culture test" on any adoptive family! Annawake is pressing her own personal beliefs into the case, which Kingsolver needs her to do to continue the story because in real-life the book would end there. As a result, Kingsolver's plot continues on the thinnest of grounds, dependent on the reader buying into a moral conundrum that no longer exists (and barely existed to begin with).

Annawake then oversteps her bounds still further to arrange a romance between Cash and Alice. Because hey, why not meddle still more? Annawake pretends to be a champion for the spirit and letter of the law, but her actions are unethical and biased. She proceeds to hold a hearing over Turtle's adoption, and arranges for Turtle to live with Alice and Cash for three months of the year. This is supposed to be a "happily ever after" resolution to the problem, but it fails as storytelling:
1) The reader has to buy into the notion of a custodial grandparentage based on two weeks' worth of dating;
2) The hearing itself is out-of-bounds, since the family's tribal blood negates ALL question of ICWA compliance in the first place;
3) The manipulative arrangement of a romance between Cash and Alice is not just cunning, it is unnecessary because Alice's family already possesses the Cherokee blood that entitles the family to resolve the case on their own. The only problem is that Annawake doesn't know how to stop.

We're supposed to enjoy this sentimental closure. "Happily ever after" is where the book started in the first place, just as nice as it would have been if Annawake had never butted in at all. (I realize that this sets up a sequel with more conflict, but *this* book achieves nothing for the family, except for Alice's two-week-old dating relationship)

So what we get is a tale of an intrusive lawyer who cleverly finds a way to resolve a problem that was never a problem until she created it in the first place, all so we can ooh and ahh over the resolution. The characters haven't progressed or evolved in personal ways (and don't even get me started on Barbie, who is wholly irrelevant to the tale, adding nothing to the characters and moving the plot nowhere).

SPOILERS..............SPOILERS................

I just started this book, after finishing "The Bean Trees," and was aware that there would be a custody dispute in this book. I was not aware that the dispute would be brought by a person of no relation to Turtle, and had no business involving herself in Turtle's life. Annawake thinks that Turtle needs to live among members of her tribe, so that "she will know who she is." If readers of the first book recall, Turtle did live among members of her own tribe for the first three years of her life, and was beaten and raped repeatedly, into muteness and near catatonic state. Taylor is the only mother Turtle has ever known and the only one to love and care for Turtle. None of this matters to Annawake, who is hellbent on restoring Turtle to the Cherokee Nation. I find this mindset offensive. Before Turtle is a Cherokee or anything else, she is a child, a PERSON, and all children need love and security and safety. If they have those needs met, their cultural heritage matters, but if those needs are NOT met, their heritage does not matter. What good will it do Turtle to live on Cherokee land if she is torn from the only mother she has ever known and is again permanently damaged by it, adding to already what was done to her? Add to that the fact that Annawake is not even a blood relative challenging the adoption, which would at least make sense, but just some troublemaking lawyer who doesn't care at all about Turtle the person, and her needs, just a little lump of Indian-ness, and is perfectly willing to destroy both Turtle's and Taylor's lives in order to install the lump of Indian-ness in her proscribed slot on Indian land.

I agree that all Indians need to do what they can to preserve their heritages but not at the price of emotional terrorism, which is what taking children away from the white parents who legally adopted them is.Turtle was not stolen or kidnapped, she was given to Taylor to save her life, and she would have been dead, with her Cherokee kind, had Taylor not taken her. Would Annawake have been happy then? I will not read this book further or any other by Kingsolver.

Barbara Kingsolver's book is noble in the fact that she tries to shed light on an important social issue, but it was simplistically written. Metaphors and smilies are beautiful when well written, but Mrs. Kingsolver abuses and misuses them. Its unfortunate that the author wrote this book at the expense of an issue like the Indian Child Welfare Act.

With 250+ millions of human beings in the whole US of A, what a fortuitous coincidence that all these people are connected via cousin Sugar. Unbelievable. And then how convenient that Alice and Cash fall for each other! There are supermarket paperback romances with sturdier storylines! I enjoyed the moral questions that Kingsolver raises, but the vehicle to express these issues is quite poor. I think _Animal Dreams_ is a million times better, and _The Poisonwood Bible_ a trillion times better.

I'm fairly new to Barbara Kingsolver, as this is only the 2nd novel of hers that I've read. But I'm very satisfied. She can turn a beautiful phrase, and she writes sparkling dialogue. And while she can get a little preachy with her politics, she's on the correct side with those politics and has every right to try to educate people about injustices in the world.

In this book, a young woman named Taylor has adopted a Cherokee girl who she names Turtle. Turtle has been sexually and physically abused, and was basically dumped on Taylor when she was 3 and Taylor was about 20 and barely starting out in her own life -- and with no intention of having a family any time soon. Taylor has nursed Turtle back to some semblance of normality, and she's now 6 or 6-1/2 years old, and Taylor is officially her adopted mother. They live in Arizona with Taylor's boyfriend Jax, a musician.

Through flukish circumstances (which are told in a way that gets right at the heart of the world's injustices to kids and to Native Americans), Turtle and Taylor get on national TV. And a Cherokee lawyer decides that the girl belongs back in the Cherokee community. That lawyer, Annawake Fourkiller, goes to see Taylor, and the meeting blows up. Taylor goes on the run with Turtle, losing the precarious toehold on security she'd built as a manager of an auto parts store and leaving cheaply with Jax. Taylor's mother Alice becomes the go-between for Taylor and the Cherokees as they try to work out a solution.

As the plot develops, we see the world through Taylor's eyes, Alice's eyes and Annawake's eyes. Each is wary of the same thing -- men -- and has been buffeted around by life. Each is fiercely determined, though the younger women are more open about it, as would be expected from their generation. Turtle not only is loved by Taylor, but she represents something to care about that she never thought she'd have. And to Annawake, Turtle represents all the children who were taken from their Native families for generations, including her brother, who wound up with a terrible childhood and is in prison for armed robbery. Annawake blames it on the impossibility of assimilating into White culture.

The book is funny in parts, such as Taylor's encounter with an idiot young woman named Barbie, who is trying to live like a real-life Barbie. Their time together in Nevada -- a ridiculous state in its own right -- shows the absurdities of American culture. But the dialogue between Taylor and boyfriend Jax, and Jax and Alice, also is full of snappy humor. And the Cherokees have their own type of gallows humor, including a hilariously sidetracked custody hearing that devolves into a debate of whether someone 20 years ago threw a cup of coffee at a diner or merely spilled it on his sleeve. That person has zero to do with the custody hearing.

The writing is beautiful -- a favorite chair is like a baseball glove, with the indention of the body like the glove's crease, or “The obstinate practicality of old women pierces and fortifies these families like the steel rods buried in walls of powdery concrete” or "I've just fallen on some bad luck and landed jelly side down..." Or wisdom such as, "“If men only knew, modesty makes women fall in love faster than all the cock-a-doodling in the world.” The wit goes on and on, and it seems legitimate coming from the mouths of these characters.

In the end, Alice gets immersed in the Cherokee nation and starts to understand its way of thinking. She becomes a bridge between Taylor and the Cherokees as they seek a compromise that's good for Turtle today but also good for the Nation in the long term. It's an education and an inspiration.

With just the right amount of humor, the author led us through a story that could have been heartrending. I thoroughly enjoyed the book.