A popular novelist, Barbara Kingsoiver's fiction has garnered much critical and commercial success. Since its publication in 1993, most reviewers and literary critics have responded positively to her third novel. Pigs in Heaven. In fact, it was nominated for an ABBY award and received the American Library Association award, the Los Angeles Times Fiction Prize, and the Cowboy Hall of Fame Western Fiction Award.

Many commentators have praised King-solver's appealing characters and insightful and sympathetic portrait of familial bonds. Victoria Carchidi suggests "we read her for the homey quality of her writing. The characters are like someone we know, or would like to know, living on the in-terstates and small towns we grew up in or drive through." She maintains that "Kingsolver teaches her readers the language of tolerance and negotiation through characters with human failings and human nobility."

Travis Silcox contends in Belles Lettres that despite...