Karbo is a novelist. In the review below, she praises Kingsover's blending of political commentary and emotional insight in Pigs in Heaven.

Barbara Kingsolver's terrific new novel, Pigs in Heaven, picks up where her highly acclaimed first novel, The Bean Trees, left off In this heart-twisting sequel, her feisty young heroine, Taylor Greer, is faced with the possibility of losing her 6-year-old daughter, Turtle. Taylor, an outspoken, self-professed hillbilly from Kentucky, had headed west to avoid the poverty and despair that were snagging her former schoolmates. Passing through Oklahoma, she was snagged instead by a child.

In the offhand way that can lead a person in a whole new direction, Taylor stopped at a bar on the edge of the Cherokee Nation; there, an Indian woman deposited a little girl on the front seat of Taylor's Volkswagen and promptly disappeared. The tiny, silent toddler, whom Taylor called...