I picked up The Bean Trees at a rummage sale (one of my favorite places to go book shopping). I almost didn't take it, but in the end I'm very glad I did.
The story is about a young girl who gets away from her go-nowhere town just as soon as she's saved up enough money to buy a car. She's not sure where she's going so she just drives. Then at one of the stops on her trip, a Native-American woman puts a baby girl on the passenger seat of her car and tells her to take it. She continues onward, now caring for a small child she nicknames "Turtle" who, it turns out, has been sexually abused. Eventually she stops out of necessity because her car dies, so she calls that city her temporary new home. There she meets a handful of characters who become her new family.
Well anyway, it seems hard to give the plot details for this one, for some reason. But I love both the style of writing and the topics that Kingsolver explores--difficult truths are realized and described in a familiar tone through the eyes of this young girl. In the end, she ends up taking a risk to help two undocumented refugees to travel to a safer home.
It's a hard book to read because of these issues--the child abuse, the plight of the undocumented refugees--but it seems heartfelt. Additionally I liked it because of the parallels I can draw to my own Mama Lilia book that I wrote for NaNoWriMo, in which the lives of an undocumented immigrant girl and a native US resident intersect.
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