Rating: 
Summary: I was wrong
Review: This was a hard book to read, because the subject matter is unpleasant. The Beans are those people whose children cannot behave while at the grocery store, and who are blind and deaf to the mayhem they create. They are the ones who drive junky old cars through your neighborhood at 11 PM on a weekday with the radio really loud. They are the ones who chew with their mouths open at the fast food joint. Not a pretty group, not a pretty book. There is a poem by Khalil Gibran about children, that goes something like: "They come through you, but they are not yours". Ms. Chute should have realized that this could also be applied to novels. She could have saved herself the trouble of inserting some commentary in the "new and improved" finished version. I would have given the book more stars if Ms. Chute had refrained from telling me how wrong I was in my reading of the novel. My consolation is that I was not alone in my mistakes. Apparently, lots of people have approached Ms. Chute with the same errors I have made. These misunderstandings have incensed Ms. Chute so much that she's been compelled to clarify her meaning for us all. Too bad of a wasted time, because of course I like my reading of the book much better. This is the beauty of literature, this is what makes a book unique for each one. If someone else were doing the reading for us, it wouldn't be as much fun. So, my advice is to pick up a copy of the "unfinished" version instead, and save yourself the nagging postscript.
Rating: 
Summary: Hard to read, harder not to
Review: You just know that this life was lived before it was written about, and that's a hard fact to swallow. The writing is brilliant, and that makes it doubly incredible that someone with this hard-scrabble background could achieve this feat. The Beans are representative of the generally unwashed and usually uneducated extended families that populate every part of our country. They are the invisible, the uncounted, the unaccepted.
Carolyn Chute is definitely an odd bird, but this book deserves to be read and re-read by anyone with an ounce of human kindness in his/her veins.
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