Sunday, June 14, 2009

The Bean Trees

Dan was assigned this as summer reading for AP English next year. He read it in one day, before school even let out. "Must be good," I thought, and gave it a try. Wow, I read it in two days. Couldn't put it down. It is one of those books that instantly takes you into another time and place and other peoples' lives.

Here's the Publisher's Weekly description of the book, since they can explain it much better than I can,
Feisty Marietta Greer changes her name to "Taylor" when her car runs out of gas in Taylorville, Ill. By the time she reaches Oklahoma, this strong-willed young Kentucky native with a quick tongue and an open mind is catapulted into a surprising new life. Taylor leaves home in a beat-up '55 Volkswagen bug, on her way to nowhere in particular, savoring her freedom. But when a forlorn Cherokee woman drops a baby in Taylor's passenger seat and asks her to take it, she does.
I won't tell you any more about it, but I'll leave you with one line from the book,
"In a world as wrong as this one, all we can do is to make things as right as we can."

1 comment:

Ben Villarreal said...

It sounds like your son's having a better time of AP English than I did! I transferred to a new school right after the semester began but found out what the summer reading was before I transferred and did it. But the day I showed up for class, they were giving group presentations on the books. The teacher gave me new readings because she didn't trust that I'd actually read them and wouldn't just report what I'd see in the presentations.

Yeah...she didn't like me much :-/