A novel by Barbara Kingsolver about a small town girl named Taylor Greer who decides to drive her car as far as it'll take her and settle down wherever it ends up breaking. Along the way she meets a Guatemalan couple and after traveling through an Indian reserve, she gets saddled with the toddler Turtle. The rest of the novel deals with the relationships between her and the people in her new town as well as the details of this unexpected motherhood.
The novel eventually spawned a sequel: Pigs in Heaven.
This book provides examples of:
- Abusive Parents: Turtle's. When your mother is desperate enough to leave you in a car with a stranger, you know it's bad.
- Artificial Limbs: Lou Ann's husband got a replacement foot after an accident. He then proceeds to
wangst about it. - The Alleged Car: Taylor drives an old junker, and her plan is to drive it until it breaks down.
- Candy Striper: Taylor mentions that many of the girls in her Kentucky hometown became Candy Stripers in high school as an extracurricular activity.
- Disappeared Dad: Both Lou Ann and Taylor have them: Lou Ann's is dead, and Taylor's was never there in the first place.
- Foil: Taylor and Lou Ann are this to each other, with Lou Ann being timid and sensitive and Taylor being brash and confident. They are also...
- Ironic Hell: Estevan describes a hell where there's a pot of delicious bubbling stew and everyone is equipped with spoons too long to feed themselves with. They could all eat if they helped each other, but being the sort of people who deserve hell, they never will.
- Mandatory Motherhood: Taylor escapes from her small town to avoid becoming pregnant....and then has a child left in her car.
- Promotion to Parent: Taylor tries to give Turtle off to her other friends, but eventually admits that she's decided to raise her.
- Teen Pregnancy: The fate of most of the girls in Taylor's hometown. Taylor escapes this, only to get another person's toddler dumped onto her lap as soon as she leaves her hometown.
- This Is My Name on Foreign: Estevan and Esperanza introducing themselves as "Steven" and "Hope" to potentially avoid prejudice.
- Trailers Always Spoil: The revelation that Turtle is an underdeveloped 3-year-old rather than the 1.5-year-old everyone assumed her to be occurs a little more than halfway through the novel, and comes as a surprise to both the characters and the reader. Unless, of course, the reader read the summary on the back cover, which describes Turtle as a 3-year-old.
- Why Did It Have to Be Snakes?: Taylor is quite nervous around tires after seeing a man thrown into the air by an exploding tractor tire as a child. Naturally, the only place she can find a job is Jesus Is Lord Used Tires.
