5^th E English Name:_________________________

The Bean Trees, by Barbara Kingsolver

Test Review

While I was reading, I underlined the following lines and passages in my book. Why, do you suppose? Remember, I’m trying to find ways to relate the people and events in the book to things and ideas in real life. This can be with symbols, or just things that represent things like themselves, or with just statements that apply to life. Write some notes about what the significance of each one might be…

1. “ ‘Do you miss your home a lot?…does it make you tired, being so far away from what you know? That’s how I feel sometimes, that I would just like to crawl in a hole somewhere and rest. Go dormant, like those toad frogs Mattie told us about.’” (Chapter 14)

2. “ ‘A human being can be good or bad or right or wrong, maybe. But how can you say a person is illegal?’” (Chapter 14)

3. The television near the end of Chapter 14, which gets the picture on one channel (but no sound), and the sound on another channel (but no picture). The waitress has a grandmother who likes the channel with sound, but she’s blind. The rest of them watch the picture, but get no sound.

4. Turtle’s language. For example, in Chapter 15, she sees a flower called a columbine: “Turtle informed us they were ‘combines,’ and we accepted her authority…Turtle waved hers up and down like a drum major’s baton, shouting, ‘Combine, combine, combine!’ None of us, apparently, was able to think of any appropriate way of following this command.” [In addition to this one, can you find other real words hidden inside Turtle’s mispronunciations of words?]

5. “…it’s hard to be depressed around a three-year-old, if you’re paying attention. After awhile, whatever you’re mooning about begins to seem like some elaborate adult invention.” (Chapter 15)

6. From Chapter 17: “But this is the most interesting part: wisteria vines, like other legumes, often thrive in poor soil, the book said. Their secret is something called rhizobia. These are microscopic bugs that live underground in little knots on the roots. They suck nitrogen gas right out of the soil and turn it into fertilizer for the plant… ‘It’s like this,’ I told Turtle. ‘There’s a whole invisible system for helping out the plant that you’d never guess was there…It’s just the same as with people.’”

7. Cynthia’s brooch in Chapter 13: “The pin at her throat was an ivory and flesh-colored cameo that looked antique. As Turtle and I were leaving I asked if it was something that had come down through her family. Cynthia fingered the cameo and laughed. ‘I found it in the one-dollar bin at the Salvation Army.’”

8. Also from Chapter 13: “I just kept saying how this world was a terrible place to try and bring up a child in. And Lou Ann kept saying, For God’s sake, what other world have we got?”

9. At the very end of Chapter 13, the dead bird in the road: “Outside of town we passed a run-over blackbird in the road, flattened on the center line. As the cars and trucks rolled by, the gusts of wind caused one stiff wing to flap up and down in a pitiful little flagging-down gesture. My instinct was to step on the brakes, but of course there was no earthly reason to stop for a dead bird.”