The Bean Trees

by Barbara Kingsolver Narrated by C. J. Critt

Overview

“The Bean Trees*is the work of a visionary. . . . It leaves you open-mouthed and smiling.”**-*Los Angeles Times

A bestseller that has come to be regarded as an American classic,*The Bean Trees*is the novel that launched Barbara Kingsolver's remarkable literary career.

It is the charming, engrossing tale of rural Kentucky native Taylor Greer, who only wants to get away from her roots and avoid getting pregnant. She succeeds, but inherits a three-year-old Native American girl named Turtle along the way, and together, from Oklahoma to Arizona, half-Cherokee Taylor and her charge search for a new life in the West. Hers is a story about love and friendship, abandonment and belonging, and the discovery of surprising resources in seemingly empty places.

Editorial Reviews

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.

Los Angeles Times

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

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.

Philadelphia Inquirer

Loving and expansive...idealistic and exhilarating.

Ms.

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

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.

New Yorker

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

From the Publisher

The work of a visionary. . . . It leaves you open-mouthed and smiling.” — Los Angeles Times

“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 York Times Book Review

"An extraordinary good novel, tough and tender and gritty and moving." — Anne Rivers Siddons

“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.” — San Francisco Chronicle

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

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

"Idealistic and exhilerating, The Bean Trees is a book that combines the most careful craft with a moral code that is loving and expansive." — Philadelphia Inquirer

“This is the story of a lovable, resourceful ‘instant mother,’ one who speaks, acts and learns for herself, becoming an inspiration to us all.” — Glamour

“This funny, inspiring book is a marvelous affirmation of risk-taking, commitment and everyday miracles...An overwhelming delight, as random and unexpected as real life.” — Publishers Weekly

Ms.

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

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.

|Los Angeles Times

The work of a visionary. . . . It leaves you open-mouthed and smiling.

Cosmopolitan

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

Anne Rivers Siddons

"An extraordinary good novel, tough and tender and gritty and moving."

Product Details

BN ID:	2940170150601
Publisher:	HarperCollins Publishers
Publication date:	05/19/2009
Series:	Greer Family , #1
Edition description:	Unabridged
Sales rank:	766,076

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.

Copyright © 1988 by Barbara Kingsolver.

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