SOURCE: “Child of Two Cultures,” in Chicago Tribune Books, July 11, 1993, p. 4.

In the following review, Wolitzer offers positive assessment of Pigs in Heaven.

Fictional characters can continue to live inside a writer's head long after a novel is written, sometimes for so long it seems they ought to pay rent. And sometimes the only way to evict them is to imagine where fortune might have taken them since last encountered on the page and write about them again.

Barbara Kingsolver's charming first novel, The Bean Trees (1988), contained a bunch of such memorable squatters, including Taylor Greer, a spunky young single woman; her adopted daughter, Turtle; Taylor's hilariously wry mother, Alice; and her hypochondriacal friend, Lou Ann Ruiz. In The Bean Trees, these women without men (for the most part), struggled against poverty and other adversities with valor and wit. Now, in that novel's sequel, Pigs in Heaven, the...