SOURCE: “Welcome to Heaven,” in Belles Lettres, Vol. 9, No. 1, Fall, 1993, pp. 4, 42.

In the following review, Silcox offers positive assessment of Pigs in Heaven, though notes that “the novel suffers from a midpoint flatness.”

Barbara Kingsolver, in the acknowledgments to her new novel, Pigs in Heaven, writes: “Other people would tell this story differently, and none of them would be wrong.” The same generosity of spirit and down-to-earth wisdom that we have come to expect from a work by Kingsolver is evident in Pigs in Heaven, a novel confronting some of the thorniest of contemporary issues.

A sequel to her much-loved and much-loaned The Bean Trees, Pigs in Heaven picks up the story of single mom Taylor and her adopted Cherokee daughter, Turtle, three years after we left them in Tucson, Arizona. A no-frills, self-confident wordsmith from a working-class Kentucky background, Taylor has settled into her life with Jax...