Bean Trees (Kingsolver) - Book Reviews

Book Reviews 
Barbara Kingsolver can write....it is one thing to create a vivid and realistic scene, and it is quite another to handle the harmonics of many such scenes, to cause all the images and implications to work together. And it is extremely rare to find the two gifts in one writer. How can I say it? Barbara Kingsolver doesn't waste a single overtone. From the title of her novel to its ending, every little scrap of event or observation is used, reused, revivified with sympathetic vibrations. The Bean Trees is as richly connected as a fine poem, but reads like realism. Its author is a poet, a Kentuckian who, like her main character, Taylor Greer, has transplanted herself to Tucson, and her book is a strange new combination: branchy and dense, each of its stories packed with microstories, and yet the whole 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 rock shop.
Jack Butler - New York Times Book Review


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


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