Placed in context with Kingsolver's other books this is essentially worthless. She turns Freida Kahlo into the most magical pixie dream girl ever and gives us a main character so thoroughly desexed and generally grey that one sort of imagines him as a Ken doll, completely generic and non-threating in every possible way. And I KNOW that's sort of the point of the main character, but still, he is pretty much one of the least enjoyable protagonists I've ever read since all you do is spend time with his guilt and boring unhappiness.

Additionally, and you may not have known this, brace yourselves, but the House Un-American Activities Committee was BAD (NOOOooooooo I've blown your mind!!). Also bad: newspapers and media. Good? Trotsky and NOTHING ELSE. Especially Americans, unless you are a hillperson. I do admire how with the Violet Brown character Kingsolver has reconfigured the Noble Savage idea (and yet it still offends me!), maybe in these kinds of cases we could call it the Magical Hillbilly?

Oh, and just so I am not coming off as some kind of dumbass "America: Love it or Leave it" type I have no problem when American wrongdoings such as the internment/concentration camps for Japanese or the aforementioned Committee are rightfully brought to task, but it almost offends me when its done so lazily and without even the slightest attempt to think about why these things happened beyond "most Americans are sheep who like to buy stuff".

ETA (Man I just keep on thinking of things to dislike about this book): Her use of slang! Oh. My. GOD. Apparently someone issued Ms. Kingsolver an urban dictionary of the 30s-50s with the challenge of using every phrase in it, no matter the fact that when people do use slang they don't use all of it at once. About 60% of the characters sounded like parodies of people from their eras (see: The mother, Salome-I-don't-know-how-to-type-accents).