Pigs in Heaven, by Barbara Kingsolver

This is a sequel to Bean Trees.

First, Kingsolver's prose is beautiful, but in this book, I increasingly skimmed the avid details of trees, roads, houses. In Bean Trees, her prose is beautiful AND concise.

Second, it was nice reading more about Turtle. Hearing her talk. Seeing how a 3 yr old moves past abuse. Abuse left its mark on her for sure, but in this sequel, we hear the strength she begins to feel because she's surrounded by love (Taylor, Jax, LuAnn & her boy Dwayne Ray).

Third, and most important, it's good to glimpse history of the Cherokee Nation. The average American believes in the "savage beast" history...and that "Natives" are people of the past. They aren't. They live among us. More often, closer to big cities.

TITLE: it's a tad hard to unravel the title. We hear the Cherokee myth of the Six Pigs as a star constellation (six boys who wouldn't listen to their moms.. won't do chores...the great spirit says, Moms know best, turns them into pigs, they run so fast, they spin up into sky). The underlying message of that myth is "Do right by your people, or else..." The word, Heaven, in the title refers to the sky in the myth...then we hear about Heaven, Oklahoma. No spoilers here... I just don't want to work that hard unraveling a book's title.

The book was too long. What I love about Bean Trees is its concise narrative combined with beautiful prose, but in this sequel, we got wayyyyy tooooo much detail.

Also, and this is important, it's been a very long time since the movement began to educate people about the hurt inflicted by using the word, "retarded." It has *always* been used, in my memory, as a slur. I'm talking the 70s. If a writer is going to treat a topic with respect, they *must* do the heavy lifting. There's zero evidence that Kingsolver wanted to jar her readers with the use of this word...but it's a jarring word for sure.

This book needed fewer characters to keep track of. E.g., she writes, "the woman who married Letty's husband's brother." -- I did a doubletake on that one. Too often, it was hard to keep track, causing me to double back to earlier passages in the book. 

3 out of 5 stars. Its worth is in its glimpse into Cherokee history (the boarding school era... thru 1970s), and the present (what reservations look like today, family life, etc.).