In the following review, Koenig offers a negative assessment of Pigs in Heaven, faulting the novel's political implications and reliance on tidy resolutions.

The six pigs in Heaven, explains a character in Barbara Kingsolver's [Pigs in Heaven], are the American Indian version of the Pleiades, or the seven sisters (one more example of Indians' being shortchanged). Originally six naughty boys who complained about being punished, they were turned into a constellation by the gods as a warning to other children. But if the moral of that story is the novel's stated theme—"Do the right thing"—the title unfortunately suggests its tone, a cute, dreamy mindlessness that subverts the issues of conflict and choice it propounds. Starting with charm. King-solver drifts into ingratialion.

Two years into a dismal second marriage, Alice feels she has made another mistake. Her silent, uncompanionable husband "has no words for Alice—nothing...