Barbara Kingsolver's The Bean Trees

Everyone has a family of some kind. It may be the parents and siblings they were born with, or it could be a gang of six elite drivers with an affinity for robbing banks at high speeds. Ultimately, family is what people make of it, and it can be the ‘traditional’ two parents, one brother, one sister, and one dog, or it could be a girl and a baby she was left with.
Barbara Kingsolver’s The Bean Trees is the story of a poor Kentucky girl with small town thoughts and big town dreams who escapes her hometown without getting pregnant, but manages by the hand of fate to be left with a child that was never her’s in the first place. The story mainly ends up taking place in Tucson, Arizona where the girl learns to love and mother the child as if it were her own, and further becomes her battle to protect the child.
Kingsolver’s book has many characters who …show more content…
There is something that can be attributed to the fact that a ‘traditional’ family has a father in it, and in some cases, this one especially, having one implies the potential to lose one as well. Turtle doesn’t have a relationship with any kind of father figure, but that’s okay because in her case, there was never a promise of one. Lou Ann lies to her mother about her marital status, and her relationship with her husband altogether - page 56, third paragraph. Turtle doesn’t lie to her mother figure, even about sensitive things like how Turtle watched her biological mother get buried alive - page 226, second to last paragraph. We know that Lou Ann comes from a traditional family, even with her father dead, we know for a fact that at least she had one - paragraph 2 of page 57. In the period of time where Turtle is able to process and comprehend information, she never truly has a father figure, and we see how Lou Ann’s relationship with her mother is one where she is compelled to lie, while Turtle’s isn’t. If someone lies, it is out of