A Self-Made (or Self-Named) Kinda GalThe Bean Trees' plucky protagonist may have been born Marietta Greer, but when she sets out on her own from her rural Kentucky home, she decides to get herself...

As the owner and principal employee of Jesus Is Lord Used Tires, Mattie is unlike any woman that Taylor has ever known. When Taylor first meets her, Mattie is wearing "blue jeans and cowboy boots a...

Estevan and Esperanza are Guatemalan refugees, and together they stand as the book's clearest representations of the violence and injustice suffered by Central American citizens throughout the 1980...

Like Taylor, Lou Ann is a small-town Kentucky girl living far from home—a romantic who fell in love with a rodeo hand, married him, and followed him to Tucson, Arizona. Which if you ask us should...

Angel RuizAngel is Lou Ann's husband—well, ex-husband, by the time the novel draws to a close. Three years before he leaves Lou Ann, Angel lost his leg after "a bad accident in his pickup truck"...