Pigs in Heaven [Hardcover]

Barbara Kingsolver (Author)

Product Details

• Hardcover
• Publisher: Harper. (1992)
• ASIN: B000RB3JQY
• Average Customer Review: 3.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (193 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #7,779,136 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Barbara Kingsolver was born in 1955 in Annapolis, Maryland, and grew up in rural Kentucky. She counts among her most important early influences: the Bookmobile, a large family vegetable garden, the surrounding fields and woods, and parents who were tolerant of nature study but intolerant of TV.
Beginning around the age of nine, Barbara kept a journal, wrote poems and stories, and entered every essay contest she ever heard about. Her first published work, "Why We Need a New Elementary School," included an account of how the school's ceiling fell and injured her teacher. The essay was printed in the local newspaper prior to a school-bond election; the school bond passed. For her efforts Barbara won a $25 savings bond, on which she expected to live comfortably in adulthood.
After high school graduation she left Kentucky to enter DePauw University on a piano scholarship. She transferred from the music school to the college of liberal arts because of her desire to study practically everything, and graduated with a degree in biology. She spent the late 1970's in Greece, France and England seeking her fortune, but had not found it by the time her work visa expired in 1979. She then moved to Tucson, Arizona, out of curiosity to see the American southwest, and eventually pursued graduate studies in evolutionary biology at the University of Arizona. After graduate school she worked as a scientific writer for the University of Arizona before becoming a freelance journalist.
Kingsolver's short fiction and poetry began to be published during the mid-1980's, along with the articles she wrote regularly for regional and national periodicals. She wrote her first novel, The Bean Trees, entirely at night, in the abundant free time made available by chronic insomnia during pregnancy. Completed just before the birth of her first child, in March 1987, the novel was published by HarperCollins the following year with a modest first printing. Widespread critical acclaim and word-of-mouth support have kept the book continuously in print since then. The Bean Trees has now been adopted into the core curriculum of high school and college literature classes across the U.S., and has been translated into more than a dozen languages.
She has written eleven more books since then, including the novels Animal Dreams , Pigs in Heaven, The Poisonwood Bible, and Prodigal Summer ; a collection of short stories (Homeland ); poetry (Another America ); an oral history (Holding the Line ); two essay collections (High Tide in Tucson, Small Wonder ); a prose-poetry text accompanying the photography of Annie Griffiths Belt (Last Stand ); and most recently, her first full-length narrative non-fiction, Animal, Vegetable, Miracle. She has contributed to dozens of literary anthologies, and her reviews and articles have appeared in most major U.S. newspapers and magazines. Her books have earned major literary awards at home and abroad, and in 2000 she received the National Humanities Medal, our nation's highest honor for service through the arts.
In 1997 Barbara established the Bellwether Prize, awarded in even-numbered years to a first novel that exemplifies outstanding literary quality and a commitment to literature as a tool for social change.
Barbara is the mother of two daughters, Camille and Lily, and is married to Steven Hopp, a professor of environmental sciences. In 2004, after more than 25 years in Tucson, Arizona, Barbara left the southwest to return to her native terrain. She now lives with her family on a farm in southwestern Virginia where they raise free-range chickens, turkeys, Icelandic sheep, and an enormous vegetable garden.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

24 of 25 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars "Bean Trees" Sequel A Bit of A Letdown, November 4, 2001

By 

Brett Benner (Los Angeles, CA USA) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Pigs in Heaven (Mass Market Paperback)

First off I have to say that I think Barbara Kingsolver is a great writer. She writes with deep felt emotion and feeling, creating well rounded and fully realized characters that you care about.That being said I felt "Pigs in Heaven" was a bit of a disappointment. Revisiting the characters she introduced in "The Bean Trees",Kingsolver weaves the story around young Turtle's American Indian heritage and her adoptive mother's paternal claims on her.One of the things I didn't enjoy was that she moves the narrative from first person to third which seems to be a device to introduce an entirely new set of sympathetic voices to add to the custody conflict. And although I can understand why the choice was made, it still made me feel somewhat removed from Taylor, the central voice of the previous novel.To me the book felt like three separate stories that were tied together instead of one solid narrative.Ultimately the story raises some interesting points about race and family, managing to be both provoking and moving if not quite as sucessfully as it's predecessor.

28 of 30 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars The Story of Turtle, September 8, 2003

By 

Ratmammy "The Ratmammy" (Ratmammy's Town, CA USA) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)   

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Pigs in Heaven (Mass Market Paperback)

PIGS IN HEAVEN by Barbara Kingsolver

PIGS IN HEAVEN is the sequel to Barbara Kingsolver's book THE BEAN TREES. The novel continues the story of the Cherokee child named "Turtle" and her adoptive mother Taylor Greer. In this sequel, we find Turtle and Taylor living together in Tucson along with Taylor's boyfriend, a life that is not quite what would be called the most perfect of environments. They live in poverty, barely making ends meet. Although Taylor does her best, her income is limited, but she gives Turtle a lot of love, and along with her boyfriend, Turtle has a new family. Turtle seems happy, and after years of being mute due to a history of abuse, she's learned to talk, and all seems to be going well.

Unfortunately, Cherokee attorney Annawake Fourkiller accidentally discovers the existence of 6-year-old Turtle, and learns that Taylor had illegally adopted Turtle outside the Cherokee nation. Annawake is ready to rectify this problem. As far as she's concerned, Turtle needs to be raised by the Cherokee. Taylor, however, does not see this, and does what she can to protect her child.

Turtle and Taylor are now on the run, fleeing from their home in Tucson and leaving the boyfriend behind. They live from motel room to motel room, eating what they can afford. It gets to a point where Taylor does not know what to do next, in fear that she and Turtle will be discovered and eventually Turtle will be taken away from her. Yet, she wonders if what she is doing to Turtle is the right thing to do. When Alice Greer, Taylor's mother, gets involved, the story takes a surprising turn, and soon Turtle's biological family gets involved as well. I was glued to the book, wanting to know whether Taylor gets to keep Turtle, or is told to hand over the child to the Cherokee Nation.

Many important issues are brought up in PIGS IN HEAVEN. Should a child of American Indian heritage be allowed to live away from his or her tribe? Should the child be allowed to be raised among the white people, never knowing his true heritage? Turtle was completely happy with Taylor, and she did not know any other mother or life. The issue of whether it was a moral crime to separate the two is a big theme, with a fitting conclusion at the end of the story.

I really enjoyed this book, having already read THE BEAN TREES, which I loved as much as this one. Both stories center on the welfare of Turtle, an endearing little Indian girl that will capture your heart. However, after reading PIGS IN HEAVEN, I doubted that what Taylor did was right. It actually gave me a different perspective on the first book.

The two books should be read in sequence, but reading one or the other will not detract in the enjoyment of either. I highly recommend both books. For those that have read Kingsolver's POISONWOOD BIBLE or PRODIGAL SUMMER, neither book is comparable to these two. The four seem to be written by different authors, simply because the style and tone of these books are very different. I give PIGS IN HEAVEN 4 stars.

33 of 37 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars A Great Suprise!, February 22, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: Pigs in Heaven (Paperback)

Common throughtout many fictional novels, the issues of family, love, and truth are all dealt with in Barbara Kingsolver's, "Pigs in Heaven". Unlike many other novels that either deal with one of these themes, or all of them sporadically, the events and themes throughout "Pigs in Heaven" are interconnected. This type of plot webbing makes the book much more intresting, allowing the reader to become involved with many different characters, instead of just one or two. When I began this required reading assignment, I was not instantly intrigued by the beginning. Actually, I wanted to throw the book away after the first chapter, because it did not grab my attention. I knew I had to read the book, so evry night I made myself read a chapter. By the third night I noticed that I could not put this book down. What I loved most about "Pigs in Heaven", where the characters. Barbara Kingsolver has a gift for making her characters painstakingly realistic. At times I felt like I was Taylor, trying to keep Turtle, or I was Jax, trying to keep a hold on my love. Sometimes, I was Annawake who was trying to preserve the culture of the Cherokee Nation. In "Pigs in Heaven", readers will have something in common with all of these characters, just as I did when I read this novel. The book provides a setting that is not mentioned enough in American Literature, the Cherokee Nation. It allowed me to look beyond the Indian identity that I was use to, where Indians wore feather and shot arrows, to the real life situations that happens on Cherokee reservations. "Pigs in Heaven" is a great book for when you just want to relax, and let the book become a part of you.