The Bean Trees - Book Review

The Bean Trees by Barbara Kingsolver is about a girl named Taylor who wants to leave home. So she saves up a little bit of money to by a car (that doesn’t run very well). She heads west, planning to stop whenever her car breaks down. However, her car breaks down somewhere in the middle of the Cherokee Nation (which is in Kansas somewhere) so she gets it fixed and keeps going.
Then one day, Taylor goes into a bar to grab a bite to eat, and as she is leaving, a lady comes over to her and hands her a baby. The lady tells Taylor to keep the baby, she doesn’t want it. Before Taylor can protest, the lady is gone. So she takes the baby and drives west still, and gets to Arizona. There she gets a job at a burger joint. She names the baby Turtle, and leaves her at the mall daycare while she is working, going back every two hours to check on her and convincing the workers there that she really is still shopping. However, Taylor eventually gets fired from her job and has to find a place to stay.
She finds an ad in the newspaper for someone looking for a roommate, so she goes to check it out. The owner of the house turns out to be a girl named Lou Ann, an ex-wife with a son named Dwayne Ray. Her husband had left her while she was still pregnant. So Taylor moves in with Lou Ann, and she gets a job at the tire place, Jesus Is Lord, where she first got her tires fixed when she arrived. Lou Ann stays home with Dwayne Ray and Turtle. The owner of the tire shop, Mattie, spends a lot of time with Taylor and Lou Ann, along with their kids. Mattie has these plants that make bean trees, and they came all the way from China. So the beans kind of represent the cycle that Taylor has gone through, traveling that long way. Mattie also keeps illegals safe by hiding them in her sanctuary.
Two of these illegals are Esperanza and Estevan. They are Mayan and lost their daughter. They end up needing to go to the Cherokee Nation, where they will pretend to be Cherokee, because their skin color is similar. Estevan and Esperanza pose as Turtles real parents and go to a place where Taylor adopts her finally as April Turtle Greer.