SOURCE: “Brilliant Stories Test Values, Truth,” in Chicago Tribune, June 23, 1989, p. 3.

In the following review, Mahin offers positive assessment of Homeland and Other Stories.

Barbara Kingsolver's Homeland and Other Stories is about community and generations and families and relationships and the passing on of wisdom.

Each story tests values; each is a search for meaning.

In the title story, the father—“a soft-spoken man who sometimes drank but was never mean”—works in the mines; the mother raises the family and sets the standards. “If I have to go out myself and throw a rock at a songbird,” she says at one point, “nobody is going to say this family goes without meat!” They sustain the family, but it is the great-grandmother who is wise. “My great-grandmother belonged to the Bird clan,” the story begins.

“Hers was one of the fugitive bands of Cherokee who resisted capture in...