"The bean trees" by Barbara Kingsolver (Virago, 1989)

The main character Marietta (first-person - a girl living in the states) doesn't know who her father is. After 5 years working part-time in a medical lab she buys a cheap VW and leaves home, renaming herself Taylor Greer. On the way, in a bar, she's given a Cherokee pre-toddler. She calls her Turtle. She finds a hotel in Broken Arrow to stay in for a while, paying her way. Then she drives to Tucson, gets punctures, finds "Jesus Is Lord Used Tires" run by Mattie. Upstairs is a sanctuary for Guatamalan and Salvadoran refugees.

Lou Ann Ruiz (third person) is giving birth in 2 months. She's into horoscopes and signs. Ivy's her mother and her grandmother's close. Her husband Angel, an ex-rodeo, who lost half a leg in an accident, has left her. After the birth of Dwayne Ray she advertises a room. Taylor applies and moves in.

Turtle's first word is "bean" (it looks like what it will grow into) and she soon learns the words for other vegetables. Taylor's mother phones to say she's remarrying. Lou Ann gets a factory job. Angel wants her to go to live with him. Mattie is interviewed on TV about the sanctuary. Taylor becomes friends with 2 refugees who live with Mattie - Estevan (an ex-teacher of English; she rather loves him) and Esperanza (who wants children). They speak to each other in Spanish because they know different Mayan languages. Esperanza tries to overdose on aspirin. Taylor learns that their daughter was taken from them because they didn't reveal names of union members. Taylor says "Sometimes I feel like I'm a foreigner too. I come from a place that's so different from here you would think you'd stepped right off the map into some other country where they use dirst for decoration and the national pastime is having babies ... Half the time I have no idea what's going on around me here".

When Turtle is X-rayed the doctor says she has old compound fractures. Social services say Taylor has no claim on Turtle. She decides to try to find Turtle's relatives so she can get them to sign something. She offers to take Estevan and Esperanza - they're in danger of being deported. They set off early and are stopped. The couple say that Turtle's their daughter. They find the original bar but the owner etc has changed. They rent a lakeside cottage for the night. Turtle twice says "Mamma" where humans are buried. Was her mother buried? Does she think humans grow like beans? Estevan and Esperanza can easily merge into Cherokee Nation. We're led to believe that Taylor will leave Turtle with them (thinking Turtle would have a better life that way) but in the end they pretend to be Turtle's parents and sign adoption papers. Taylor phones her now-married mother for the first time in months. Then she has almost a conversation with Turtle, about the people back home. They pause in a library where Taylor identifies what Turtle calls a bean tree as wisteria. It came from the Orient. It thrives in poor soil thanks to rhizobia - bugs that help the plants. She phones Lou Ann, who isn't going to join Angel - she asked advice from his mother. She's found a boyfriend of African descent.

Chapters have titles which are the odd-page headers. There's an avalanche of happy news at the end - I guess the characters deserve it. Some symbolic loose ends are tidily tied up too. Themes include motherhood, language, finding a home, friends vs family. The prose is fast-moving, the style flexible -

• The clouds were pink and fat and hilarious-looking, like the hippo ballerinas in a Disney movie
• I began to suspect that sharing harmonious space with an insightful Virgo might require even greater credentials than being a licensed phlebotomist in the state of Arizona
• she was looking at me the way you do when you first notice someone is deformed. In sixth grade we had a new teacher for three weeks before we realized his left hand was missing. He always kept his hanky over it. We'd just thought it was allergies
• White rocks sloped up out of the water like giant, friendly hippo butts
• the city was like a palm stretched out for a fortuneteller to read, with its mounds and hillocks, its life lines and heart lines of dry stream beds
• Cynthia was concerned about Turtle's tendency to bury the dollies, believing that it indicated a fixation with death, but I assured her that Turtle was only trying to grow dolly trees

I like it.

Other reviews

• Annie sauveur (I see its faults. A book about a white woman making a lot of half-hearted commentary on POC issues. ... it’s weird that she didn’t call the police—especially when she discovers that Turtle had been sexually abused. It’s a little strange that she just adopts Turtle and that’s the end of it. But I think that is who Taylor is. She is very straightforward, steadfast, and headstrong. Blunt, to a fault. ... In some scenes, she blends into the background, she asks and answers in ways that fit the other characters a little too well. ... The writing is magic.)
• Winona media (This novel is about great damage and great healing. From a rich mix colloquial language, off-beat characters, and an imaginative plot, a central theme of hope in the face of justified despair is skillfully developed.)

"Homeland and other stories" by Barbara Kingsolver (HarperPerennial, 1989)

Themes thread through the stories which are each about 20 pages long - women worrying about relationships; people's place in the world (and in the world of rocks, plants and animals); male vs female perspectives; parenting or deciding to be parents; furniture makers; ex-hippies. Gender politics too -

• in "Why I am a danger to the public" a woman's doing "a man's job"
• in "Jump-Up Day" the main character says that she's a boy.
• in "Rose-Johnny", a girl comes to admire a women who "was not, as we always heard, half man and half woman ... there was something not quite womanly in her face, but maybe any woman's face would look the same with that haircut" (p.204). Later in the same story "I knew, in a manner that went beyond the meaning of words I could not understand, that she was no more masculine than my mother or aunt, and no more lesbian than Lebanese. Rose-Johnny was simply herself, and alone" (p.218)

The latter quote shows how she sometimes "tells" rather than "shows", which is fair enough. Else when too, her characters seem more insightful and expressive than you'd expect - "I squeezed her hand to bring some strength into mine. I thought of the previous afternoon, of watching her, beautiful and permanent, against the continual loss of the Eel River. The things we will allow ourselves to believe" (p.59).

Her symbolism seems at times heavy-handed (or tightly coordinated, depending on how you view it) -

• A bridge, designed and built by the main character's partner to be nature-friendly, is destroying by nature. Their relationship is in trouble. At the end of the story "she climbs and slides down the slick boulders of the creek bed opposite him. She can't get any closer because of the water, still running high after the flood. "Whitman!" She screams his and other things, she can't remember what. She had hardly hear her own voice over the roar of the water. When he does look up she sees that he isn't hurt. He says something she can't hear. It takes awhile for Lydia to understand that he's crying. Whitman is not dead, he's crying. "God, I thought you were dead," she yells, her hand on her chest, still catching her breath" (p.40)
• In a story where the main character's father died because of infected water, the character sees a snake while she's cycling. Later, "On the deserted banana plantation the long drainage ditches, channels of infected water, shone like an army of luminous snakes marching toward the sea" (p.195). Snakes marching?

I like the details she keeps adding to sentences - e.g. "Mother made bologna sandwiches and we ate lunch in a place called Cherokee Park. It was a shaded spot along the river, where the dry banks were worn bald of their grass. Sycamore trees grew at the water's edge, with colorful, waterlogged trash floating in circles in the eddies around their roots" (p.18). Each story has sufficient description, characters, theme and sometimes plot to keep me reading.

Other reviews

• Russell Banks, New York Times (Of the 12 stories in this first collection by the author of the widely praised novel "The Bean Trees," all are interesting and most are extraordinarily fine)
• Kirkus (Kingsolver's stories are so sharply defined and deftly constructed that their lackluster endings come as a disappointment--they don't support all the talent that the stories contain. No crescendos here, then, but, still, a lovely repertoire)
• My reading life
• Laura Furman, LA Times (Kingsolver is most generous to her women and children, giving men more shallow characterizations. The men are annoying or ineffectual, problems for the women to solve. But all the children, male and female, are understandable and are magnets for the warmth of the women. I had the happy feeling halfway through this solid, readable collection that here is a writer who is telling us about characters in the middle of their days ...)

"Flight Behaviour" by Barbara Kingsolver (2013, faber and faber)

In the first section the main character Dellarobia (an unhappy, 27 year-old mother living in a poor, isolated farming community) is walking uphill on her way to having an affair (in flight from her marriage). A strange burst of color makes her turn back. When her extended family says they're going to have the trees on that hill cut down, she tells them to go and have a look first. They see millions of bright butterflies that Dellarobia hadn't seen because she hadn't been wearing her glasses. Her prescience (she doesn't initially want to tell them that she's been up there) is given religious significance by many church-going people, and a butterfly expert arrives to see why the Monarchs had changed their migratory behaviour. Media and tourists arrive. This contact with the outside world (not least the temporary work as a research assistant) give her the confidence to split with her husband and go to college.

The novel begins "A certain feeling comes from throwing your good life away, and it is one part rapture". Paragraph 2 gives an indication of the style

The children were with her mother-in-law. She'd dropped off those babies this morning on barely sufficient grounds, and it might just kill her to dwell on that now. Their little faces turned up to her to like the round hearts of two daisies: She loves me, loves me not. All those hopes placed in such a precarious vessel. Realistically, the family could be totaled. That was the word, like a wrecked car wrapped about a telegraph pole, not salvageable parts. No husband worth having is going to forgive adultery if it comes to that. And still she felt pulled up this incline by the hand whose touch might bring down all she knew. Maybe she even craved the collapse, with an appetite larger than sense.

The figurative language piles up

Hester wasn't the only one living in fantasyland with righteousness on her side; people just did that, this family and maybe all others. They built their tidy houses of self-importance and special blessing and went inside and slammed the door, unaware the mountain behind them was aflame. Dellarobia felt herself flung from complacency as if from a car crash, walking away from that vale of fire feeling powerful and free. (p.31)

If this is the voice of Dellarobia, who seems insufficiently challenged intellectually, it would work. But is it? Here's more

Her mind was on temporary leave from the din when her phone caused her to jump, ratcheting its manic jangle from the sofa cushions under her. It must have slid out of her pocket and attempted its own escape (p.42)

And more. Sentence after sentence

Snow. Roy [the dog] bounded wolfishly through the white deep, nosing into drifts, leaving a tangled line of tracks as he hurried to put his small yellow tags on all on the yard's most notable points. The dog version of Post-its. The cedars in the Cooks' front yard were flocked with white, and their holly tree was enveloped in ice, giving the effect of a commemorative Christmas plate. The big maple on the property line was less enchanting as it dropped limbs onto the driveway at steady intervals, crash, crash, like an angry drunk. (p.566)

or this

Dellarobia began dismantling the octopus of warm stuck-together clothing, pulling out socks, while Dovey tried to fold tiny flannel shirts whose seams puckered like lettuce (p.251)

Sometimes it offers opportunities for humour

• " Dellarobia had managed to corral her [daughter Cordie's] fleecy hair into two wild blond poofs, with a center part so crooked it could get a DUI, and that was the sum total of grooming the child would presently allow. Dellarobia harbored a secret fondness for the wild streak, something she herself had swallowed down long before her daughter was born, only to see it erupt again in Codie like a wet-weather spring " (p.105). I had to look up "DUI"
• " People automatically estimate a mom's IQ at around her children's ages, maybe dividing by the number of kids, rounding up to the nearest pyjama size " (p.115)

I don't always know whether the narrator or the character is making a point, which is a shame given that the intellectual development of Dellarobia is a key theme.

• "She stuck with the packaged colors, which had alluring names like Amazon and Ruby, but came out plain old green and red. Much like life itself" (p.110)
• "Just now Dellarobia was jonesing to step on the back porch for a very quick smoke, but was thwarted by the pink roll of towel that lay at the bottom of the door like a dank, fat snake. She knew that thing would be cold to the touch, like something dead" (p.170)
• "It was like being inside a video game (p.207). Contextually Dellarobia seems to be expressing this, but she doesn't have a computer or smartphone.
• "She tried on a fitted corduroy blazer, forest green, circa Angie Dickinson " (p.404). Both the use of "circa" and the name-drop seem inappropriate for someone of the main character's age and education. Whereas in "It was probably their chief project as a married couple, she thought: tearing honeysuckle out of a fence " (p.359) it's clear who's thinking what.

Analogies between her plight and that of natural world abound. The final chapter's entitled "Perfect Female". Earlier, we've been told that in the insect world a perfect female has all the parts and behaviours to bring up offspring, so it's no surprize that the book ends the way it does. She moves out to live with Dovey, taking the children with her. On p.318 she says "If fight or flight is the choice, it's way easier to fly" but she's learnt her lesson now. On p.422 she and Dovey had this discussion

"Remember when we were going to be airline stewardesses?" she asked. "But they don't actually go anywhere, do they? Fly around all day and end up in the same place, bringing snacks to grumpy people, who needs it?" Dellarobia thought that sounded exactly like her life

Various themes thread through the book.

• At 17 she had a stillborn. She discovers that in Mexican culture the butterflies are thought to be the souls of children. In the snow she brings to life a premature lamb.
• Dellarobia's relationship with her matriarchal mother-in-law Hester changes.
• Science versus Religion isn't a theme. I thought it might become so. Religious quotes change the mind of the land-owner, but as far as the plot's concerned, the significance is that Bobby delivers the quotes.
• They cut a tree down for an xmas tree (alluding to the planned logging), but can't afford to decorate it. Nor can they tap into the family's horde of decorations.

At around p.340 things slow down. A scene in the second-hand, house-clearance warehouse doesn't deliver enough bucks per page. Around p.420 I wondered about skipping to the next section. Infodumps come in the form of 2-person dialogues, or, on p.480, pretty much raw. Throughout, I like how Cordie's depicted, the way she talks and how she plays with toys. Preston's more of a plot convenience.

I ended up with a nostalgia for the short story form. At times in this book the blanket-bombing detail and figuration become tiring. We're reminded too many times of Cub's personality, of the family's poverty. I read passages like the following and wondered why so much words were needed.

At the upper east corner of the field they began to make their way down along the property line between their pasture and the Cooks' dead orchard. The skeletal peach trees in their rows leaned into the slope with branches upstretched like begging hands. Casualties of the strange weather. The window in Preston and Cordie's room looked out on these trees, and for a while she'd kept the curtains drawn, it was so depressing. (p.355)

Other reviews

• Robin McKie (Guardian)
• Liz Jensen (Guardian) (Kingsolver's masterly evocation of an age – ours, here, now – stumbling wilfully blind towards the abyss is an elegy not just for the endangered monarch butterfly, but for the ambitious, flawed species that conjured the mass extinction of which its loss is a part. Urgent issues demand important art. Flight Behaviour rises – with conscience and majesty – to the occasion of its time)
• Beth Jones (Telegraph) (a compelling plot with lyrical passages and flashes of humour. Absorbing and entertaining, Flight Behaviour engages the reader in the quotidian details of Dellarobia’s life, while insisting that we never forget the crumbling world beneath her, and our, feet)
• Kay Rollinson (the book’s title gives a hint about how it is actually all underpinned by the metaphor of flight, as well as the reality of flight that is part of the butterflies’ migration)
• Arifa Akbar (Independent) (Until a certain point, early on in Flight Behaviour, it seems as if Barbara Kingsolver has written the perfect novel. Her prose is elegant, urgent and rich with beauty, depth and feeling ... in its weakest passages, Kingsolver slips into the trite language of romantic fiction. We are informed that Dellarobia is a petite Southern beauty but Kingsolver will not let us forget the fact. ... We are reminded of the message – that Dellarobia's life is an impoverished one despite her feistiness and ambition – with tedious consistency. ... This is a novel as compelling and epic as it is maddening. One wonders whether, had Kingsolver chosen brevity over heft, she might not have ended up with a better book)
• Sonia Nair (While Dellarobia’s observations of life in a small American town often come across as astute, intelligent and often wry, Kingsolver is less successful when it comes to weaving her climate change premise into the story. Lengthy sections of scientific reasoning and technical jargon clumsily pepper the later half of the book – predominantly in conversations between Ovid and Dellarobia – but instead of piquing one’s interest in the subject, they come across as exceedingly laboured and clunky, and detract from the brilliant writing found in other parts of the novel. Clichés abound)