SOURCE: “Solomon's Wisdom,” in New Statesman and Society, December 10, 1993, p. 40.

In the following review, Scott offers favorable assessment of Pigs in Heaven.

The pigs in question are stars. Six of them were bad Cherokee boys to whom their parents, to teach them a lesson, fed pig food. The children became pigs, then stars. The spirits anchored them in the sky, “to remind parents to love their kids, no matter what”. The seventh star in the cluster is the mother who wouldn't let go.

It's a neat central image for a novel that reworks Solomon's judgment on two women who claim the same child.

Turtle is Cherokee. She has been abused by her uncle and is wont, when distressed, to lie speechless in a dry bathtub with a blanket over her. Taylor, her fiercely loving adoptive mother, is white. Taylor is fortunate in her own mother, the redoubtable Alice...