So yes, what we are saying is that Barbara Kingsolver is kind of a big deal. President Clinton presented her with a National Humanities Medal, Oprah praised her novel The Poisonwood Bible (1998), and her books were nominated for dozens of awards. In the meantime, to fill you in on your Kingsolver background, after publishing The Bean Trees she went on to become one of the biggest names in contemporary American writing. Think Star Wars without The Empire Strikes Back. There are some folks who'd say that the story in The Bean Trees just isn't complete without it. Which may sound like a super bacon-y breakfast or a certain type of mud bath the hogs can't stop raving about, but as far as sequels go, this one's worth a read. In 1993, five years after The Bean Trees was published, Kingsolver followed it up with a sequel called Pigs in Heaven. So, tying these issues together, The Bean Trees has some powerful things to say about the responsibility that human beings have for one another-even when it seems that, as individuals, the whole seven billion of us are worlds apart. the colonial-imperial conquest of Indigenous lands, and.Set in the early 1980s, The Bean Trees tackles a whole slew of topics that you can go ahead and file under the heading 'social justice issues.' Front and center? Since then, the novel has become an American classic, and-as you may have guessed-a familiar selection for high-school English curricula. It was her first novel, and her first big break as a fiction writer. But then, just when she finally hits the road to meet her fortune in the great unknown, the unthinkable happens: a Cherokee woman in Oklahoma tells Taylor to take her child.īarbara Kingsolver published The Bean Trees in 1988.

Which was pretty typical in rural Kentucky in those days, if you didn't get that.īasically, to her, the burdens of marriage and child rearing seem like terrible traps. Having grown up poor and female in rural Kentucky, Taylor has made a point of never ending up barefoot and pregnant in anybody's kitchen. Getting sidelined by the unexpected is exactly what happens to Taylor Greer, the twenty-something protagonist of Barbara Kingsolver's The Bean Trees. Basically, you go way out of your way to make sure that something NEVER happens, and then, just when you least expect it, it happens anyway. The premise of this book syncs up pretty nice with that old Alanis Morissette song about things being ironic.

The bean trees