The Bean Trees

by
Barbara Kingsolver

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Overview

Clear-eyed and spirited, Taylor Greer grew up poor in rural Kentucky with the goals of avoiding pregnancy and getting away. But when she heads west with high hopes and a barely functional car, she meets the human condition head-on. By the time Taylor arrives in Tucson, Arizona, she has acquired a completely unexpected child, a three-year-old American Indian girl named Turtle, and must somehow come to terms with both motherhood and the necessity for putting down roots. Hers is a story about love and friendship, abandonment and belonging, and the discovery of surprising resources in apparently empty places.

Available for the first time in mass-market, this edition of Barbara Kingsolver's bestselling novel, The Bean Trees, will be in stores everywhere in September. With two different but equally handsome covers, this book is a fine addition to your Kingsolver library.

A "warmhearted and highly entertaining first novel...." --Kirkus Reviews

Editorial Reviews

Cosmopolitan

An astonishing literary debut....For a deep breath of fresh air, spend some time in the neighborhood of The Bean Trees.

Glamour

This is the story of a lovable, resourceful 'instant mother,' one who speaks, acts and learns for herself, becoming an inspiration for us all.

More Reviews (6) Fewer Reviews

Los Angeles Times

The Bean Trees is the work of a visionary.... It leaves you open-mouthed and smiling.

Ms.

A major new talent. From the very first page, Kingsolver's characters tug at the heart and soul.

New York Times Book Review

As clear as air. It is the southern novel taken west, its colors as translucent and polished as one of those slices of rose agate from a desert shop.

New Yorker

A lively first novel...an easy book to enjoy.

Philadelphia Inquirer

Loving and expansive...idealistic and exhilarating.

San Francisco Chronicle

So wry and wise we wish it would never end....The chatty, down-home audacity of Barbara Kingsolver's remarkable first novel hooks us on the first page.

Product Details

ISBN-13: 9780060915544
Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
Publication date: 2/28/1989
Edition description: Reprint
Edition number: 1
Pages: 256
Sales rank: 208,926
Lexile: 900L (what's this?)
Series: Harper Perennial
Product dimensions: 5.62 (w) x 10.88 (h) x 0.60 (d)

Meet the Author

Barbara Kingsolver

Barbara Kingsolver is the author of seven works of fiction, including the novels The Poisonwood Bible, Animal Dreams, and The Bean Trees, as well as books of poetry, essays, and creative nonfiction such as Animal, Vegetable, Miracle. In 2000, she was awarded the National Humanities Medal, our country's highest honor for service through the arts. She lives with her family on a farm in southern Appalachia.

Biography

According to the biography on her website, Barbara Kingsolver began writing around the age of nine. Her early "oeuvre" included poems, short stories, and essays, including one noteworthy piece on school safety that was published in the local newspaper, helped to pass a local bond issue, and netted the author a $25 savings bond -- "on which she expected to live comfortably into adulthood."

Kingsolver left her native Kentucky to attend DePauw University on a piano scholarship; but intellectual curiosity (the same quality that informs her writing) prompted her to transfer from the music school to the college of liberal arts where she majored in biology. Immediately after college, she traveled in Greece and France and returned to the U.S. to pursue her master's degree in science from the University of Arizona. She worked for a while as a science writer for the university before becoming a freelance journalist. In 1986 she won an Arizona Press Club Award.

Kingsolver's first novel, The Bean Trees, was composed entirely at night during a period of chronic, pregnancy-related insomnia. Published in 1988, this story of a young woman transplanted from Kentucky to Tucson was reviewed enthusiastically by critics. " As clear as air," rhapsodized The New York Times Book Review. "It is the southern novel taken west, its colors as translucent and polished as one of those slices of rose agate from a desert shop." Readers, too, proclaimed the story a delight.

Since then, Kingsolver has produced a string of bestselling novels, including Pigs in Heaven, The Poisonwood Bible (an Oprah's Book club selection), and Prodigal Summer. She has also authored collections of her poems (Another America), short stories (Homeland), and essays (Small Wonders); as well as nonfiction narratives like Animal, Vegetable, Miracle.

Good To Know

In 2008, Kingsolver delivered the commencement address at Duke University, offering graduates advice on "How to be Hopeful."

She is a member of the Rock Bottom Remainders, a rock and roll band consisting of published writers, including Amy Tan, Matt Groening, Dave Barry, and Stephen King among others.

1. Date of Birth:
  
  April 8, 1955
2. Place of Birth:
  
  Annapolis, Maryland
1. Education:
  
  B.A., DePauw University, 1977; M.S., University of Arizona, 1981
2. Website:
  
  http://www.kingsolver.com

Read an Excerpt

The One to Get Away

I have been afraid of putting air in a tire ever since I saw a tractor tire blow up and throw Newt Hardbine's father over the top of the Standard Oil sign. I'm not lying. He got stuck up there. About nineteen people congregated during the time it took for Norman Strick to walk up to the Courthouse and blow the whistle for the volunteer fire department. They eventually did come with the ladder and haul him down, and he wasn't dead but lost his hearing and in many other ways was never the same afterward. They said he overfilled the tire. Newt Hardbine was not my friend, he was just one of the big boys who had failed every grade at least once and so was practically going on twenty in the sixth grade, sitting in the back and flicking little wads of chewed paper into my hair. But the day I saw his daddy up there like some old overalls slung over a fence, I had this feeling about what Newt's whole life was going to amount to, and I felt sorry for him. Before that exact moment I don't believe I had given much thought to the future.

My mama said the Hardbines had kids just about as fast as they could fall down the well and drown. This must not have been entirely true, since they were abundant in Pittman County and many survived to adulthood. But that was the general idea.

Which is not to say that we, me and Mama, were any better than Hardbines or had a dime to our name. If you were to look at the two of us, myself and Newt side by side in the sixth grade, you could have pegged us for brother and sister. And for all I ever knew of my own daddy I can't say we weren't,except for Mama swearing up and down that he was nobody I knew and was long gone besides. But we were cut out of basically the same mud, I suppose,just two more dirty-kneed kids scrapping to beat hell and trying to land on our feet. You couldn't have said, anyway, which one would stay right where he was, and which would be the one to get away.

Missy was what everyone called me, not that it was my name, but because when I was three supposedly I stamped my foot and told my own mother not to call me Marietta but Miss Marietta, as I had to call all the people including children in the houses where she worked Miss this or Mister that, and so she did from that day forward. Miss Marietta and later on just Missy.

The thing you have to understand is, it was just like Mama to do that. When I was just the littlest kid I would go pond fishing of a Sunday and bring home the boniest mess of blue-gills and maybe a bass the size of your thumb,and the way Mama would carry on you would think I'd caught the famous big lunker in Shep's Lake that old men were always chewing their tobacco and thinking about. "That's my big girl bringing home the bacon,"she would say, and cook those things and serve them up like Thanksgiving for the two of us.

I loved fishing those old mud-bottomed ponds. Partly because she would be proud of whatever I dragged out, but also I just loved sitting still. You could smell leaves rotting into the cool mud and watch the Jesus bugs walk on the water, their four little feet making dents in the surface but never falling through. And sometimes you'd see the big ones, the ones nobody was ever going to hook, slipping away under the water like dark-brown dreams.

By the time I was in high school and got my first job and all the rest,including the whole awful story about Newt Hardbine which I am about to tell you, he was of course not in school anymore. He was setting tobacco alongside his half-crippled daddy and by that time had gotten a girl in trouble, too, so he was married. It was Jolene Shanks and everybody was a little surprised at her, or anyway pretended to be, but not at him. Nobody expected any better of a Hardbine.

But I stayed in school. I was not the smartest or even particularly outstanding but I was there and staying out of trouble and I intended to finish. This is not to say that I was unfamiliar with the back seat of a Chevrolet. I knew the scenery of Greenup Road, which we called Steam-It-Up Road, and I knew what a pecker looked like, and none of these sights had so far inspired me to get hogtied to a future as a tobacco farmer's wife. Mama always said barefoot and pregnant was not my style. She knew.

It was in this frame of mind that I made it to my last year of high school without event. Believe me in those days the girls were dropping by the wayside like seeds off a poppyseed bun and you learned to look at every day as a prize. You'd made it that far. By senior year there were maybe two boys to every one of us, and we believed it was our special reward when we got this particular science teacher by the name of Mr. Hughes Walter.

Reading Group Guide

The wisteria vines on their own would just barely get by is how I explained it to Turtle, but put them together with rhizobia and they make miracles.

-Taylor Greer in The Bean Trees

Plot Summary

Marietta Greer spent her childhood in rural Kentucky determined to do two things: avoid getting pregnant and escape rural Kentucky. At the start of the novel, she has headed west in a beat-up '55 Volkswagon, changing her name to "Taylor" when her car runs out of gas in Taylorville, Illinois. By the time two tires give way in Tucson she has with her a stunned, silent three-year-old Cherokee girl who was, literally, dropped into her arms one night. She has named the child Turtle, for her strong, snapping-turtle-like grip. In Tucson Taylor finds friendship and support in Lou Ann Ruiz, a fellow Kentuckian and single mother, with whom she and Turtle share a house. Her newfound community also includes Mattie, who runs a safe house for political refugees in the upstairs rooms above her auto repair shop. The novel's theme of fear, flight, homelessness, and finding sanctuary within a community are present in Taylor's struggle to find a place where she belongs, and the more urgent plight of two Central American refugees, Estevan and Esperanza. These fellow travelers help one another create new lives and redefine the meanings of home and family.

Kingsolver on The Bean Trees

"I always think of a first novel as something like this big old purse you've been carrying around your whole life, throwing in ideas, characters, and all the things that have ever struck you as terribly important. One day,for whatever reason, you just have to dump that big purse out and there lies this pile of junk. You start picking through it, and assembling it into what you hope will be a statement of your life's great themes. That's how it was for me. It probably wasn't until midway through the writing that I had a grasp of the central question: What are the many ways, sometimes hidden and underground ways, that people help themselves and each other survive hard times?"

Topics for Discussion:

1. The Bean Trees deals with the theme of being an outsider. In what ways are various characters outsiders? What does this suggest about what it takes to be an insider? How does feeling like an outsider affect one's life?

2. How and why do the characters change, especially Lou Ann, Taylor, and Turtle?

3. In many ways, the novel is "the education of Taylor Greer." What does she learn about human suffering? about love?

Customer Reviews

Average Rating 4

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GeorgeEllington

Posted November 6, 2009

more from this reviewer

The Bean Trees

I admit, I am no great fan of modern American literature. Apart from Ernest Hemingway, Philip Roth, and Raymond Carver, I hardly touch the stuff. I prefer a foreign setting, not to mention a different genre. And with that bias, I approached Barbara Kingsolver at long last, and found The Bean Trees to be remarkably compelling. The story of Taylor Greer, on a journey across the country, heading nowhere in particular, simply seeking to escape her dreary life. Only to be handed a life she could not have expected when a baby is thrust into her car and left in her care. Kingsolver has created characters who seem quite far from me, lives and experiences distinct from my own. Yet somehow she manages to make me care about these people. She can weave a tale around a superficially simplistic setting, a deceptively banal event - and inject it with such meaning, such feeling. Cheers to you, Ms. Kingsolver. I look forward to reading more of your works.

4 out of 4 people found this review helpful.
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Anonymous

Posted April 19, 2010

A great quick read

I really enjoyed this book. I was hooked on the characters and loved the way she described the different scenarios. I have passed this on to my daughter and she is enjoying it.

3 out of 3 people found this review helpful.
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Anonymous

Posted November 28, 2011

Good read!

The Bean Trees is a heartwarming book about a girl from a small town, Taylor, and her journey as she tries to avoid getting pregnant and escape her small town. Taylor meets many people such as Mattie who works at a tire shop and is motherly towards her. She also meets a young abused girl named Turtle and even though she had avoided pregnancy,took care of her. Mattie provides a save house for illegal immigrants, and Taylor gets very attached to them as well. I really enjoyed this book because it shows how hard it is to be a woman. All throughout the story womens' struggles are portrayed and it inspired me. I also liked how it showed many great relationships were built, and you get to know the characters.I didn't like how the book became slow at parts, and it was sad to hear the horrible encounters Turtle had gone through. I would recommend this book to mainly women who are interested in an inspiring story about real life situations. Overall, I enjoyed this book and I'm incredibly glad I read it!

1 out of 1 people found this review helpful.
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chloesmomst

Posted May 16, 2010

Not what I expected

I was not hooked from the begining. But in a few brief turns of the pages the characters came to life. Bean Trees is a bit quirky. The characters are strange and the locations even stranger but the reader begins to care about the characters. Taylor seems to be floating thru life accepting whatever comes to her but as the story progresses she finds herself and her voice. The relation with LouAnn deepens and LouAnn deepens as a person. The caring of Mattie for the people you know and those you don't is unique. And the relation between Esteven and Esperanza to each other and Mattie and Taylor and Turtle is beautiful and deep.
This is not the best book I have ever read but it is worth reading from beginning to end.

1 out of 1 people found this review helpful.
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Anonymous

Posted December 3, 2008

An interesting story

The bean trees was a very interesting story to read to hear about the girls life story and where all she travled in her life trying to get out of the state she is in Kentucky. She ends up with a child that a women just left in her car which was somehthing that was put on her shoulders as to moving away from things and getting away of any stress. I would recomined this book to those who are wanting to move out of state and search for a new life.

1 out of 1 people found this review helpful.
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Anonymous

Posted January 10, 2006

A Waste of Time

Unfortunately, this book was required reading for my freshman year English class. At that time, I was interested in classics, and books with great lessons and symbols for everyday life. After reading and enjoying many books with boring names I was actually excited to read The Bean Trees. Having read To Kill a Mockingbird multiple times, I was looking for another great book. When I rented The Bean Trees from the library, I started reading immediately, looking for symbols and lessons comprable to To Kill a Mockingbird. What I got was a pointless story where the greatest conflicts include choosing to have an affair with a man, and getting papers for a little girl. The only lessons this book teaches you are that euthanasia should be used, abortion should be used, and that Child Services is evil. Seriously, if you are an average Conservative, do not read this book, unless you are unfortunate enough to be assigned it.

1 out of 2 people found this review helpful.
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Anonymous

Posted February 4, 2012

Excellent book

This was Kingsolver's first novel and it's very well written. Makes you want to read it in one sitting. Charming story. OK for middle school and up.
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Georgie62

Posted January 26, 2012

Engaging Read!

Love Barbara Kingsolver's beautiful prose. I read this after my high schooler read this for required reading and loved it. I got plenty of great insight by following the analysis that he and his classmates were writing. A beautiful and moving story of the power of women and friendship!
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Anonymous

Posted January 2, 2012

Entertaining

Lacked character development but overall an easy, entertaining read.
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Anonymous

Posted December 27, 2011

Favorite book

I initially read the book in high school and loved it then. I've reread it several times since, and get just as wrapped up in it every time I do. Barbara Kingsolver does an amazing job of telling an amazing story.
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Reader12TD

Posted December 7, 2011

I Also Recommend:

Worth the time

I have read several of Barabara Kinsolver's books and was anxious to get into "The Bean Trees". I initially found it difficult to enjoy. I considered not finishing it, but came back to it and am very glad that I did. The imagery of her writing and the detail that she creates are what got me through - and it was definately worth the effort. It is one of those books with the kind of characters that you will continue to think about long after you have put the book back on your shelf (or archived it on your Nook!)
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Anonymous

Posted December 2, 2011

I like this book

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2ufgators

Posted October 12, 2011

more from this reviewer

Heartwarming!

A story of friendship, hardship, and new beginnings......definately a win from Kingsolver! Her stories of transformation always keep me coming back........Who wouln't love Turtle?!
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321Run

Posted September 30, 2011

Nuff said

No text was provided for this review.
krspdx

Posted September 16, 2011

more from this reviewer

Highly Recommended

I read this book with my niece. This was assignment for her, freshman year high school. I enjoyed it and thought it was thought provoking touching. I love the Main Character and thought she had great spirit and an independent women- A good lesson for young women.....
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Toros

Posted August 15, 2011

more from this reviewer

Barbara Kingsolver, The Bean Trees

I admit, I am no great fan of modern American literature. Apart from Ernest Hemingway, Philip Roth, and Raymond Carver, I hardly touch the stuff. I prefer a foreign setting, not to mention a different genre. And with that bias, I approached Barbara Kingsolver at long last, and found The Bean Trees to be remarkably compelling. The story of Taylor Greer, on a journey across the country, heading nowhere in particular, simply seeking to escape her dreary life. Only to be handed a life she could not have expected when a baby is thrust into her car and left in her care. Kingsolver has created characters who seem quite far from me, lives and experiences distinct from my own. Yet somehow she manages to make me care about these people. She can weave a tale around a superficially simplistic setting, a deceptively banal event - and inject it with such meaning, such feeling. Cheers to you, Ms. Kingsolver. I look forward to reading more of your works.

0 out of 1 people found this review helpful.
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jenniwrenn

Posted July 21, 2011

more from this reviewer

Enjoyed it.

Not as good as Poisonwood, but still a good read.
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CathyFitzgerald

Posted July 6, 2011

more from this reviewer

Good book

Lot of the same themes as Poisonwood Bible, about family, culture, morality, Did not affect me in the deep way Poisonwood Bible did, but I still enjoyed the book. Also a quick, easy read-can accomplish in a weekend,
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8903373

Posted June 30, 2011

Good book. Would read again.

I thought this book was a very interesting read. It was not my favorite but i would definitely read this book again amd tell my friends about this book. I had to read this book for my english class and i think it was a good choice for a summer reading assignment.
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8400091

Posted June 21, 2011

Some was good

I loved this book but my mom was breathing down my neck to finsh the book i could have enjoyed it more if my mom was on me like that
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The Bean Trees

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Customers Who Bought This Also Bought

More About This Book

Overview

Related Subjects

Editorial Reviews

Cosmopolitan

Glamour

Los Angeles Times

Ms.

New York Times Book Review

New Yorker

Philadelphia Inquirer

San Francisco Chronicle

Product Details

Meet the Author

Barbara Kingsolver

Biography

Good To Know

Read an Excerpt

Table of Contents

Reading Group Guide

Customer Reviews

Rating Distribution

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4 Star

3 Star

2 Star

1 Star

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The Bean Trees

A great quick read

Good read!

Not what I expected

An interesting story

A Waste of Time

Excellent book

Engaging Read!

Entertaining

Favorite book

Worth the time

I like this book

Heartwarming!

Nuff said

Highly Recommended

Barbara Kingsolver, The Bean Trees

Enjoyed it.

Good book

Good book. Would read again.

Some was good