2008 Book n+x Pigs In Heaven
I've loved every Barbara Kingsolver novel I've ever read1, and her Poisonwood Bible is one of the most stunning and amazing works I've been privileged enough to open. Pigs in Heaven isn't prize-winningly good, but it is still good enough that I bought it at 4pm on Saturday (from a friend's leaving sale), started reading around 10pm when I got back from the theatre, finished around 3am, and immediately turned back to the beginning to read it again.
It's a continuation of the story of Taylor and her adopted daughter Turtle, first introduced in The Bean Trees, and like other Kingsolver novels, explores issues of community, identity, and cultural differences. In fact, it explores one of the slightly-too-convenient endings from The Bean Trees in much greater depth and with more realistic moral ambiguity, as well as introducing new characters with their own stories to tell.
The prose is, of course, as well-crafted as ever, and my only complaint is that possibly the point of view shifts from one character to another a bit too often. However, this is not a big problem, as Kingsolver is one of the few authors who can actually make a changing point of view work as a narrative device (see The Poisonwood Bible).
1 Except for Prodigal Summer, but I never finished that, so maybe I'd have got into it if I'd read more.
It's a continuation of the story of Taylor and her adopted daughter Turtle, first introduced in The Bean Trees, and like other Kingsolver novels, explores issues of community, identity, and cultural differences. In fact, it explores one of the slightly-too-convenient endings from The Bean Trees in much greater depth and with more realistic moral ambiguity, as well as introducing new characters with their own stories to tell.
The prose is, of course, as well-crafted as ever, and my only complaint is that possibly the point of view shifts from one character to another a bit too often. However, this is not a big problem, as Kingsolver is one of the few authors who can actually make a changing point of view work as a narrative device (see The Poisonwood Bible).
1 Except for Prodigal Summer, but I never finished that, so maybe I'd have got into it if I'd read more.