The+Bean+Trees

//Below...a quote from Kingsolver and some potential discussion starting points....// **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?"

=Discussion Questions= 
 * 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?

=Critical Praise = "The question of speech is not merely a matter of style. When Taylor and Lou Ann Ruiz meet, they feel at home with each other because they talk alike ... Back home, Estevan taught English; now he will teach Taylor to see her own words from the viewpoint of an outsider, and thus show her how subtly language is linked to political reality. Another of the major subplots of the book, also associated with language, is the gradual development of a child called Turtle, for whom Taylor becomes responsible. Turtle has been brutalized and does not, for a long time, talk. When she does begin, her first words are the names of vegetables, including, most prominently, beans. There is a stark fine poetry in this talking by naming, and when Miss Kingsolver ties it in with the book's name and the fate of Turtle's mother, the echoes are sonorous indeed. " -Jack Butler, New York Tim —//Jack Butler, New York Times Book Review//