[In the following review, Scott offers favorable assessment of Pigs in Heaven.]

The pigs in question are stars. Six of them were bad Cherokee boys to whom their parents, to teach them a lesson, fed pig food. The children became pigs, then stars. The spirits anchored them in the sky, “to remind parents to love their kids, no matter what”. The seventh star in the cluster is the mother who wouldn't let go.

It's a neat central image for a novel that reworks Solomon's judgment on two women who claim the same child.

Turtle is Cherokee. She has been abused by her uncle and is wont, when distressed, to lie speechless in a dry bathtub with a blanket over her. Taylor, her fiercely loving adoptive mother, is white. Taylor is fortunate in her own mother, the redoubtable Alice, raised on a hog farm and ex-wife of a man who is wedded to his TV. They are a family without men: a man, pronounces Alice, is “somebody who won't go out of his way for you”.

Taylor's lover, gangly musician Jax, is not of this breed. The entire weight of his edgy intelligence is bent on Taylor. Dialogue between the two of them is shot through with the self-irony of a man who knows his woman is her own woman; and that his only sensible course is patience and restraint. It is also elliptical, wry, smart and very funny.

Turtle's quick eyesight leads to nationwide celebrity. She is spotted on TV and identified as Cherokee by chip-on-her-shoulder Indian lawyer Annawake Fourkiller. Annawake's efforts to return the child to the Nation prompt Taylor into flight; mother and child's odyssey across middle America in the company of a real-life bulimic Barbie doll is by turns glorious farce and—as Taylor loses both money and job—a tragedy of despair.

On the way, she learns the realities of mixed-race adoption; and her return to negotiate with Annawake becomes inevitable. Rather less inevitable is Alice's involvement with the Cherokees and the final, utterly whacky resolution of Turtle's custody by the Nation's council.

There are many small delights from a cast of alternately dippy and super smart people. Taylor plays rock music in her peach tree to frighten the birds; Jax dallies with a landlady who talks like a 19th-century romance; the town lunatic sticks empty bottles over the branches of a tree. The minor characters are as vivid and as numerous as the family of which everyone—Alice, Taylor, Turtle and Jax—eventually find themselves to be part.

In other hands, the heartwarmingly happy ending could have become sentimental tosh. But Kingsolver maintains throughout the delicate balance between irony and tenderness that makes this novel a real treat.