I'm not a huge fan of Kingsolver, but read this for a book club. When I was 16 or 17 I read Animal Dreams and Bean Trees, and loved those. But in the last few novels, I've felt she gets very preachy. In this novel, I got into the beginning a lot more than I'd expected- that was a pleasant surprise. Then, it devolved into once-sided polemic political nonsense. I would tend to agree with her politics, but they are so emotional and ... naive. Workers and the poor are never wrong, etc. I'm also a bit sick to death of Frida and Diego - they don't capture my imagination. Having just read a World War I novel, I was excited about Trotsky entering the picture, but again it took a very clearly one-sided view on an incredibly complex time in history.