Pigs in Heaven

by Barbara Kingsolver Narrated by C. J. Critt

Overview

Picking up where her modern classic The Bean Trees left off, Barbara Kingsolver's bestselling Pigs in Heaven continues the tale of Turtle and Taylor Greer, a Native American girl and her adoptive mother who have settled in Tucson, Arizona, as they both try to overcome their difficult pasts.

Taking place three years after The Bean Trees, Taylor is now dating a musician named Jax and has officially adopted Turtle. But when a lawyer for the Cherokee Nation begins to investigate the adoption-their new life together begins to crumble.

Depicting the clash between fierce family love and tribal law, poverty and means, abandonment and belonging, Pigs in Heaven is a morally wrenching, gently humorous work of fiction that speaks equally to the head and the heart.

Editorial Reviews

New York Times Book Review

Possessed of an extravagantly gifted narrative voice, Kingsolver blends a fierce and abiding moral vision with benevolent concise humor. Her medicine is meant for the head, the heart and the soul.

Newsweek

A crackerjack storyteller. . . Kingsolver has a way with miracles. One is the way she opens her plot to them. The other is the way she makes us believe.

People

Full of wit, compassion, and intelligence.

Washington Post Book World

There is no one quite like Barbara Kingsolver in contemporary literature. Her dialogue sparkles with sassy wit and the earthy poetry of ordinary folks' talk; her descriptions have a magical lyricism rooted in daily life but also on familiar terms with the eternal.

San Francisco Chronicle

Kingsolver makes you care about her characters to the point of tears; she is bitingly funny—and she writes like a dream.

Cosmopolitan

Breathtaking. . . unforgettable. . . . This profound, funny, bighearted novel, in which people actually find love and kinship in surprising places, is also heavenly. . . . A rare feat and a triumph.

Los Angeles Times Book Review

That rare combination of a dynamic story told in dramatic language, combined with issues that are serious, debatable and painful...[it's] about the human heart in all its shapes and ramifications.

Boston Globe

Immensely readable, warmhearted...brim[ming] with down-home wisdom and endearing characters.

Kirkus Reviews

For what's hoped to be a "break-out book," a greatly gifted storyteller returns to the characters and settings of her celebrated first novel (The Bean Trees, 1987). Kingsolver previously tracked plucky ex-Kentuckian Taylor Greer as she made her way west to Tucson, struggling to earn a living and to deal with the frightened, wounded toddler Turtle, who had been abandoned in Taylor's care in Oklahoma. Now it's three years later. Settled Tucsoners Taylor and Turtle are on vacation at the Hoover Dam when six-year-old Turtle witnesses an accident—a retarded man has fallen into a spillway. When the man is rescued, Turtle becomes a celebrity—which brings self-confidence but also the attention of Cherokee Nation authorities in Heaven, Oklahoma—especially that of Indian-activist lawyer Annawake Fourkiller, who recognizes Turtle as a missing Cherokee child called Lacey Stillwater; Lacey, it turns out, is the daughter of a deceased Cherokee woman whose alcoholic sister's abusive boyfriend broke both of Turtle's arms before the sister and boyfriend ditched her and disappeared. When Fourkiller pays an ominous visit to Taylor, whose adoption of Turtle may have been illegal, Taylor packs up the child and goes on the lam. As their flight becomes more punishing, Turtle regresses severely. Meanwhile, Taylor's spirited mother Alice Greer, remembering she has a Cherokee cousin in the town of Heaven, pays a visit, snoops around, and falls in love—with Cash Stillwater, Lacey/Turtle's grandfather and only living relative. Soon Taylor (no mother, not even those in the Indian myth of the odd title, is more loving) shows up to spare Turtle the trials of flight. All will be amicably,hilariously, and heartwarmingly settled to everybody's satisfaction. Not the truly wonderful book it might have been—characters who seem important disappear; carefully marked trails turn out to be merely picaresque, leading nowhere—but a terrific read nonetheless. (First printing of 100,000)

From the Publisher

A novel full of miracles.” — Newsweek

“Breathtaking...unforgettable....This profound, funny, bighearted novel, in which people actually find love and kinship in surprising places, is also heavenly....A rare feat and a triumph.” — Cosmopolitan

“Full of wit, compassion, and intelligence.” — People

“Immensely readable, warmhearted...brimming with down-home wisdom and endearing characters.” — Boston Globe

“Kingsolver makes you care about her characters to the point of tears; she is bitingly funny—and she writes like a dream.” — San Francisco Chronicle

"Possessed of an extravagantly gifted narrative voice, Kingsolver blends a fierce and abiding moral vision with benevolent concise humor. Her medicine is meant for the head, the heart and the soul." — New York Times Book Review

“That rare combination of a dynamic story told in dramatic language, combined with issues that are serious, debatable and painful...[it’s] about the human heart in all its shapes and ramifications.” — Los Angeles Times Book Review

“There is no one quite like Barbara Kingsolver in contemporary literature. Her dialogue sparkles with sassy wit and the earthy poetry of ordinary folks’ talk; her descriptions have a magical lyricism rooted in daily life but also on familiar terms with the eternal.” — Washington Post Book World

Los Angeles Times Book Review

That rare combination of a dynamic story told in dramatic language, combined with issues that are serious, debatable and painful...[it’s] about the human heart in all its shapes and ramifications.

Cosmopolitan

Breathtaking...unforgettable....This profound, funny, bighearted novel, in which people actually find love and kinship in surprising places, is also heavenly....A rare feat and a triumph.

San Francisco Chronicle

Kingsolver makes you care about her characters to the point of tears; she is bitingly funny—and she writes like a dream.

Newsweek

A novel full of miracles.

NOV 94 - AudioFile

This sequel to the critically acclaimed The Bean Trees continues the stories of Taylor and her adopted, Native American daughter, Turtle. It also introduces a new player, Annawake Fourkiller, a Cherokee attorney bent on getting Turtle back to the Nation so she may have a traditional upbringing. The narrator uses different voices for the numerous characters, doing a wonderful job with all but Turtle, who luckily doesn't speak much. The story moves well, and the production is of the highest caliber although it's a little slow in delivery. The story may bring tears to your eyes, so be prepared to drive more slowly near the end of the novel. E.F. ©AudioFile, Portland, Maine

Product Details

BN ID:	2940170037414
Publisher:	HarperCollins Publishers
Publication date:	07/12/2016
Edition description:	Unabridged
Sales rank:	1,183,499

Read an Excerpt

Queen of Nothing

Women on their own run in Alice's family. This dawns on her with the unkindness of a heart attack and she sits up in bed to get a closer look at her thoughts, which have collected above her in the dark.

It's early morning, April, windless, unreasonably hot even at this sun-forsaken hour. Alice is sixty-one. Her husband, Harland, is sleeping like a brick and snoring. To all appearances they're a satisfied couple sliding home free into their golden years, but Alice knows that's not how it's going to go. She married him two years ago for love, or so she thought, and he's a good enough man but a devotee of household silence. His idea of marriage is to spray WD-40 on anything that squeaks. Even on the nights when he turns over and holds her, Harland has no words for Alice--nothing to contradict all the years she lay alone, feeling the cold seep through her like cave air, turning her breasts to limestone from the inside out. This marriage has failed to warm her. The quiet only subsides when Harland sleeps and his tonsils make up for lost time. She can't stand the sight of him there on his back, driving his hogs to market. She's about to let herself out the door.

She leaves the bed quietly and switches on the lamp in the living room, where his Naugahyde recliner confronts her, smug as a catcher's mitt, with a long, deep impression of Harland running down its center. On weekends he watches cable TV with perfect vigilance, as if he's afraid he'll miss the end of the world--though he doesn't bother with CNN, which, if the world did end, is where the taped footage would run. Harland prefers the Home Shopping Channel because he can follow it with the sound turned off.

She has an edgy sense of being watched because of his collection of antique headlights, which stare from the china cabinet. Harland runs El-Jay's Paint and Body and his junk is taking over her house. She hardly has the energy to claim it back. Old people might marry gracefully once in a while, but their houses rarely do. She snaps on the light in the kitchen and shades her eyes against the bright light and all those ready appliances.

Her impulse is to call Taylor, her daughter. Taylor is taller than Alice now and pretty and living far away, in Tucson. Alice wants to warn her that a defect runs in the family, like flat feet or diabetes: they're all in danger of ending up alone by their own stubborn choice. The ugly kitchen clock says four-fifteen. No time-zone differences could make that into a reasonable hour in Tucson; Taylor would answer with her heart pounding, wanting to know who'd dropped dead. Alice rubs the back of her head, where her cropped gray hair lies flat in several wrong directions, prickly with sweat and sleeplessness. The cluttered kitchen irritates her. The Formica countertop is patterned with pink and black loops like rubber bands lying against each other, getting on her nerves, all cocked and ready to spring like hail across the kitchen. Alice wonders if other women in the middle of the night have begun to resent their Formica. She stares hard at the telephone on the counter, wishing it would ring. She needs some proof that she isn't the last woman left on earth, the surviving queen of nothing. The clock gulps softly, eating seconds whole while she waits; she receives no proof.

She stands on a chair and rummages in the cupboard over the refrigerator for a bottle of Jim Beam that's been in the house since before she married Harland. There are Mason jars up there she ought to get rid of. In her time Alice has canned tomatoes enough for a hundred bomb shelters, but now she couldn't care less, nobody does. If they drop the bomb now, the world will end without the benefit of tomato aspic. She climbs down and pours half an inch of Jim Beam into a Bengals mug that came free with a tank of gas. Alice would just as soon get her teeth cleaned as watch the Bengals. That's the price of staying around when your heart's not in it, she thinks. You get to be cheerleader for a sport you never chose. She unlatches the screen door and steps barefoot onto the porch.

The sky is a perfect black. A leftover smile of moon hides in the bottom branches of the sugar maple, teasing her to smile back. The air isn't any cooler outside the house, but being outdoors in her sheer nightgown arouses Alice with the possibility of freedom. She could walk away from this house carrying nothing. How those glass eyeballs in the china cabinet would blink, to see her go. She leans back in the porch swing, missing the squeak of its chains that once sang her baby to sleep, but which have been oppressed into silence now by Harland's WD-40. Putting her nose deep into the mug of bourbon, she draws in sweet, caustic fumes, just as she used to inhale tobacco smoke until Taylor made her quit.

She raised a daughter in this house and planted all the flowers in the yard, but that's nothing to hold her here. Flowers you can get tired of. In the record heat of this particular Kentucky spring the peonies have blown open their globes a month ahead of Memorial Day. Their face-powder scent reminds her of old women she knew in childhood, and the graveyard. She stops swinging a minute to listen: a huffling sound is coming from the garden. Hester Biddle's pigs. Hester lives a short walk down the road and has taken up raising Vietnamese miniature potbellied pigs for a new lease on life after her stroke. She claims they're worth two thousand per pig, but Alice can't imagine on what market. They're ugly as sin and run away for a hobby, to root in Alice's peony beds. "Go on home," Alice says in a persuasive voice. The pigs look up.

"I mean it," she says, rising from the porch swing, her hands on her hips. "I'm not above turning you all into bacon."

In the dim light from the kitchen their eyes glow red. Pigs are turning out to be the family curse: Alice's mother, a tall, fierce woman named Minerva Stamper, ran a hog farm alone for fifty years. Alice picks up an empty flowerpot from the porch step and throws it at the pigs. The darkness absorbs it. She throws a dirt clod and a pair of pruning shears, which also vanish. Then a medium-sized aluminum bowl. Harland ordered the Cornucopia Of Bowls from the shopping channel for their wedding anniversary, so now their home has a bowl for every purpose. She picks up another one and gives it a fling. She'll have to pick them up in the morning, in front of God and the Biddles, but she wants those pigs out of her life. She finds a galvanized watering can and lifts herself on the balls of her feet, testing her calves. Alice is in good shape, despite her age; when she concentrates she can still find all her muscles from the inside. When her first husband left her the house fell apart but she and her daughter held up well, she thinks, everything considered.

She heaves the watering can but can't tell where it's gone. It lands with a ding--possibly it struck a member of the Cornucopia. The red pig eyes don't even blink. Alice feels defeated. She returns to the porch to collect her losses.

She's not walking away from here. Who would take her in? She knows most of the well-to-do women in town, from cleaning their houses all the years she was raising Taylor, but their respect for Alice is based on what she could tell the world about their basements. On Fridays, Alice plays poker with Fay Richey and Lee Shanks--cheerful, husky-voiced women who smoke a lot and are so thankful to still be married, if she left Harland they'd treat her like she had a virus. Minerva and the hog farm are both gone, of course, the one simply dead and buried, the other sold to pay its own debts. It depresses Alice deeply to think how people's lives and all other enterprises, like life insurance, can last long enough to cancel themselves out.

A mockingbird lands on the tip of a volunteer mulberry that has grown up through the hedge. Flapping to stay balanced, he makes the long branch bob and sway like a carnival ride. His little profile flails against a horizon the color of rising dough. In the few minutes it took Alice to make an accounting of her life, dawn was delivered to this address and the automatic spotlight on Biddles' barn winked off. No matter what kind of night you're having, morning always wins.

The mockingbird springs off his mulberry branch into darkness and then materializes up on the roof, crowing to this section of the county that her TV antenna is his and his alone. Something about the male outlook, Alice thinks, you have got to appreciate. She stands with her arms crossed against her chest and observes the dark universe of the garden, which is twinkling now with aluminum meteorites. She hears the pigs again. It's no wonder they like to come here; they get terrified down at Biddles' when Henry uses more machinery than he needs. Yesterday he was using the hay mower to cut his front yard, which is typical. The poor things are just looking for a home, like the Boat People. She has a soft spot for refugees and decides to let them stay. It will aggravate Hester, who claims that every time they eat Alice's peonies they come home with diarrhea.

Copyright © 1994 by Barbara Kingsolver.

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