A review by cdjdhj
Pigs in Heaven by Barbara Kingsolver

3.0

This book is the sequel to Barbara Kingsolver's book The Bean Trees -- it has the same characters but is set three years after the first book when it is discovered that Turtle's adoption by Taylor isn't really legal. I did not like this book nearly as well as I liked The Bean Trees -- in fact it was a bit of a chore for me to get through it. The story line was somewhat interesting, but not compelling. The beginning of the book seemed completely disconnected from the end. the character Lucky Buster, who was the catalyst for the entire storyline, just sore of disappeared. There were also some little details about the inconsistencies between the the two books that bothered me...for example in The Bean Trees, the main character describes her Native American Cherokee blood as her "ace in the hole" but in Pigs in Heaven she and her mother Alice seem almost surprised to find out that they have Cherokee blood. Did they forget a little thing like that? Also, in the first book, Turtle's "real" name is April but then in the second book, her real name is "Lacey." Maybe Kingsolver needed to re-read The Bean Trees before she wrote the sequel. I have heard that this author's other books including, The Poisonwood Bible, are very good and worth reading, but after Pigs in Heaven, I need to take a break from Kingsolver for a while.